Tender Buttons Lyrics
The coal light
The callous
The caress
The calm
The colour
The cortex
The codine
The comma
The context
The green
The fine
The fall
The financer
The dream
The fen
The fine
The fin
The defend
The fawn
Then do
The coal light
The colours
The caress
The calm
The colour
The caress
The cortex
The codine
The comma
The context
The likeness
Die cut
Die cut
Die cut
Die cut
Die cut
Die
THis song is written through automatic writing, similar with a lot of the songs on "Tender Buttons". I'm not sure if it's supposed to even mean anything. But yeah... it's damn good.
No fucking idea what this song could possibly mean, but it's damn good.
i couldn't begin to really explain where i get this impression since there are so many words in here that i would have a hard time explaining. i'd say the most accessible pathway for my understanding of it is when trish says "defend the fawn, then do" and at the end "die, cut" it seems like a cathartic wish to lash out about something like a sexual abuse (though not necessarily autobiographical) - i get that from the callus caress context codine, etc...but how will we ever know?
I assumed that this song, like the album as a whole, alludes to the 1914 experimental work "Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms." Stein's well known for what she termed "antiliterature," in which she attempted to heighten the reader's awareness of language itself by "writing badly." Most of the time it seems she does this with inane repetition and silly sing-songs, but in "Tender Buttons" she organized words into senseless clusters for the sonic effect (and, I guess, to play with and subvert their dictionary definitions by creating new associations). I've always felt as though Broadcast was playing with this idea in terms of their experimental sound collages and, in this song especially, with Stein's textual experimentation.
There's an amazing video for this song, if anyone's interested.
You tube has a video made by ceres & calypso with this song. the woman got up from a car crash and is walking thru a series of weird things in slow motion. I think she is suppossed to be dead. .