Canary

I've read and interview about Guyville and Liz said:

"This song ['Canary'] is a perfect example. This isn't talking about a guy; it's talking about me and my home life with my family, having this stressful relationship with this quasi-abusive brother, and trying to be a good little girl for everyone while all this shit was going on inside me. And I had these contrary feelings and inappropriate thoughts, and my piano was where I would go. I was allowed to practice piano, so instead of practicing, I was making up these subversive songs. This is probably fucking the oldest one on Guyville, now that we come to it, because I can see myself in my parents' house, and what I'm saying is: 'Send it up on fire in the music, up to the heavens. I will be deaf and stop listening to you all before I will shut up. Deaf before dawn.' There is a line in there about sex, like: 'I come when you circle the cherry/I sing like a good canary'– but that's acknowledging that even later. I think that would've been a line added later... rewritten, in a sense, to describe... I'm still there. I'm still stuck in a context where I have no voice, but I'm inside here somewhere."

I think it's about a woman who always tries to make her husband happy but everything she does is wrong so she has a breakdown and burns the house or something down. I can't listen to this song alone it's too creepy I always skip it. Oh and thanks Kei I had never noticed the voice in the background but I can't make out what it is saying.

hate to break it to everyone. but a few of yall are missing some of the point. it is totally about "dry anger", bad relationships, frusteration etc. and other typically liz goodness,

but its also about a man who doesn't know how to eat a girl out properly. seriously,

"I jump when you circle the CHERRY, I SING like a good canary, I COME when called, I COME that's ALL."

she's sick of faking it. of singing, when he does his pathetic thing on her.

this dude needs to figure out how to get her off for real, among other things,

loves it

The thing I love about her song writing is that it is very rarely simple cut and dried.

For. Example I write with a number 2 pencil This can either be talking about conformity or standardization.

Or I learn my name Again A name is something anyone would know but in context it could mean identity or role.

Almost every line of this song has at least two possible and although similar sounding (ie standardization or conformance) they give very very different meanings.

So depending on the interpretation you could have a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown that is furious and is plotting revenge

Or a wan in a dead relationship with an inept hisnd and shes just tired and ready to give up but wants to provoke some type of shock to try to wake things up

Also the voice in the background I registered on the remastered version and noticed that alot of the shit that sort of lived under the main tracks on the original release are way harder to hear or are gone. I could barely hear it but I'd guess its liz talking with a recording mic on about something unrelated to the actual song. This happens more than once on this album and it's only pizza talking.

First of all, read NeonFlow's anwer with Liz's own explanation of the song's background in her childhood. Dogma72's answer is also spot-on: young women are not given options ("here's your #2 pencil"), and then gladly accept this state of affairs, because they discover that accepting it, conforming, is highly valued, while asking for something more or different is frowned upon. It's a double-edged sword: you are assigned a role, and then (even worse) you are rewarded for accepting it.

It's the added verse, about how all of this manifests later in sex, where the song becomes especially brilliant. The popular answer, that it's about bad oral sex, is just so wrong and backwards that it pains me.

It's about all the guys -- and it would be all of them, in Liz's experience in Guyville -- who think that if they can give a girl great head and make her come, that suffices completely. "I come, that's all." I come, but I don't get listened to. I come, but my ideas don't get taken seriously. I come, but none of my other needs are attended to in the least.

(I mean, this is not happening in a small town in 1955 where the boys don't know how to give good head and the girls don't know to masturbate if their boyfriend's efforts fall short. It's not about the orgasm but the context in which it takes place. And it's not about a specific relationship, but about men and women in general, in this time and place.)

There are two or three great double meanings here, too. Everyone gets that the "cherry" is a clitoris, but it's also virginity / the hymen, so it also makes it clear that this has been going on since her earliest experiences with men (when she was 17 or even, metaphorically, 12).

"Canary" is probably here because it rhymes with "cherry," but it also brings to mind the "canary in a coal mine" whose failure to sing indicates danger and possible death. So "I sing like a good canary" is "I make sure he knows he gets me off because the whole point for him is not to give me pleasure, but to satisfy his own ego as a pleasure-dispensing device."

Hence "I come when called," which now goes from a double entendre to explicitly sexual. And following the preceding lines, it's devastating. If there's anything that is (or should be) all about you, it's your orgasm. "I come when called" means it's about the other person. Which leads us into "I come, that's all" as above.

I'll also note that Liz loves the alternate section that's sort of a bridge but isn't, and that is intensely personal and harder to parse ("Dance of the Seven Veils" does this, too). She's explained that "Send it up on fire, deaf before dawn" is a purely subjective attempt to describe her emotional reaction to being put into this situation.

Twisted reaction to unhappy marriage/relationship. Gorgeous but creepy; certainly not something I can listen to in the dark. Does anyone know what the man is saying very faintly in the background, starting at around the 30-second mark?

isnt this song on the thirteen soundtrack?

It kind of makes me think of those murders where mothers with a dozen children and a controlling husband flip and murder their families. Perhaps a woman who sets her home on fire after going mad? Just a shot in the dark. It could mean anything.

this song isn't creepy! what're you talking about?

anyway, it's about a relationship that is so boring and its making liz some kind of mindless freak.

it's a creepy song. i always thought it was a murder ballad but further analysis and research says that the line actually goes "deaf before dumb", like it's not about female docility but actually about breaking through some ground. the verses are of this person being all docile and being caged like a canary and the chorus is saying "send it up on fire, deaf before dumb" like do it, just stop being a fucking canary, fly you freak, go crazy!!