Woman King

To me, this song suggests the narrator is driving through the rural South, catching glimpses of the scenery and envisioning a mythical female figure who will revitalize the land.

The first verse depicts a farmyard at sunset, with a perching blackbird, a raven circling overhead, and a shirt on a clothesline flapping in the breeze. The images of black birds and an empty shirt evoke a feeling of hollowness and foreboding. In the next verse, the narrator casts his mind forward to a possible future in which time slows as a "woman king" falls asleep, emphasizing the power of the figure and her deep connection to the land. Unlike the desolate loneliness of the first verse, the second verse presents a more peaceful nightfall in which the land and its ruler are in harmony.

The next verse depicts a series of insects -- a horsefly, red ants, a "garden worm" -- along with cigarette ash on a windowsill. Compared with the landscape of the first verse, this verse is much closer and more intimate, focusing on the minute details of the scene. These images suggest slow decay and disintegration. By contrast, the following verse depicts the woman king actively battling evil. The implication is that rather than suffering gradual decline at the hands of pests, the woman king bravely faces evil directly.

The fifth verse depicts a broken-legged horse and someone's "eye on the shotgun shell", perhaps contemplating whether to shoot the horse. The verse also mentions a hornet nest in a church bell, signifying the bell is seldom used and forewarning of the fury that will ensue if the bell is rung now. The last verse depicts the woman king "thumb down" and weeping, a reference to Roman gladiatorial combats in which a thumb down from the ruler supposedly meant that the defeated man should die. As before, the woman king is depicted as a decisive, active figure who empathizes with her subjects but nevertheless does what must be done.

This song serves as a perfect opening to the EP, which explores the idea of femininity through depictions of several mythic female figures, seen from the perspective of male narrators. Like the other women in the album, the woman king is vulnerable despite her power: she fights evil but bleeds for it, she sentences a man to death but weeps as she does so. Yet this vulnerability, this receptiveness to the world even as she imposes her will on it, is not seen as a weakness but rather an integral and positive part of the woman king's essence. Even the phrase "woman king" hints at this: she is both a powerful ruler -- a king -- and a woman with human characteristics, able to feel compassion and empathy. This approach to femininity is further developed with the rest of the album.