The Yellow Ones

my favorite song off summer in abaddon. like all pinback songs, it's cryptic and vague but it's just beautiful to listen to. i love the piano in the background.

When you inject heroin you first draw blood out of your vein and let the drug mix with your blood. you then push it into your body. Addicts refer to an empty vein as one that has been used so much that you can no longer draw blood. So certainly in one sense this is about drug addiction but ultimately its bigger than that. The nature is true addiction is that one starts out with the goal of killing pain, ending pain, relieving pain. Quickly the drugs become necessary for the body's function and cause greater and greater pain. its a methaphor for life, often that which we think will bring us peace will bring us greater misfortune.

ha oh yeah, the yellow ones, so romantic. itunes is a joke more often than not with those things.

as far as the song goes, I think "vein empty" just refers to feeling drained and weak/exhausted. which kind of it the vibe of the song that I get.

one of the best. deffinatley

i was minding my own business and this song comes on from my playlist... made me stop doing whatever i was doing and just listen. it's really a great song. ... the last line "vein empty" maybe on a high?

Generally when you get high on something intravenously the idea is to inject the drug into your veins, and not draw blood out.

So vein empty doesn't make much sense unless he's talking about donating blood, which is very thoughtful of him, but I think it just means nothing.

On an interesting note, iTunes has this on their essential list of "Indie Rock Love Songs".

Alien abduction. The aliens are the yellow ones. The part during the second verse with the call and response thing going on seems like it could be about ufos. "There's some strange shape in the sky. A bright light over the horizon. It's changing direction now. It's headed towards the village, better warn the people"

Anyway, that's just one way of looking at it. A friend told me that a long time ago and it always made sense to me with the lyrics. I think this song is crushingly sweet and sad and weird and beautiful.

I believe there are two independent parts to this song. The name and the radio-talk then the the normal lyrics. I see no correlation of the two. In this post I offer my interpretation for the name and radio-talk which I fell is only background scenery for the main lyrics. Pinback has a penchant for classic SciFi, E.G. they're named for a character in Dark Star, and they have referred to George Orwell's original broadcast of War of the Worlds in other songs. The interleaved verses sounding like an old radio broadcast I believe is a paraphrase of the radio broadcaster in Grover's Mill. It's very similar to the "man on the scene" reports. Also, in the broadcast he refers to Grover's Mill as a village. By itself, that's weak, but consider that description of the alien craft in WotW. [speaking of the diameter] "About thirty yards. The metal on the sheath is... well, I've never seen anything like it. The color is sort of yellowish-white." I like to believe this is what they're referring to as "The Yellow Ones".

Awesome song. My favorite on this CD.

This song is about Hydromorphone (Dilaudid).

They're infamous little yellow pills opiate users inject. Many people who've had them (and can compare them to opiates) maintain that it's one of the best opiate highs attainable.

Dilaudid is mentioned also in the movie Drugstore Cowboy.

"I feel my head goin' down again" - refers to the opiate 'nod' people often get.

"You disappear from the foreground" - pretty much sums it up right there.