When I Light Your Darkened Door

This song is one word, beautiful. It's about love, it's about being alive.

This song is one word, beautiful. It's about love, it's about being alive.

To light your darkened door could be to bring light/life/love to a darkened home/heart/person. Or it may be a play on the phrase "to darken your door" which means to come in or visit. And therefore may be the speaker leaving. So is it a love being brought to a person unwilling, or a lover leaving. Either way the name breaks on his lips, and she is beautiful with roses and lilies(the flower of death?) there maybe more, has j. tillman said anything about it?

Gawd. I'm glad I stayed on the net till 4:53am.

I was listening to Leonard Cohen's Bird on the Wire, and there's a lyric, "[I saw] a pretty woman, leaning in her darkened door / She cried to me, 'Hey, why not ask for more?'" I've read that Tillman's a Leonard Cohen listener (he also played a cover for MOJO's The Songs of Leonard Cohen Covered), so I wonder if perhaps he took the phrase from that song.

I think of "Bird on the Wire" as a redemption song, or forgiveness song, written through the perspective of a guy who feels like he's fucked everything up. So it's cool to think about, that maybe this song was written to kind of continue on the relationship of those characters - a beautiful woman offering herself to this guy who considers himself to be unworthy and good for nothing. If you think of it like that, this song is like his inner dialogue, and his self-doubt in thinking that this woman doesn't know who she's looking at, that the "darkened door" refers to her not being able to see him clearly for who he is.