In Our Bedroom After the War

To me, this song is very bittersweet. It sounds positive yet sad when you listen to it, but I think it's just a sort of aural trick. The war is over, yes. But at what cost? "If there's no one there,/Then there's no one there." Well, what about the person left behind? They have still have to live through the drudgery of life. The war is over, but maybe life was better during the war. At least "they" were there. The line "All the living are dead and the dead are all living" emphasizes this. No one came out unscathed. The people who died live on in memory, whereas the people left alive are so destroyed by the war that their old selves are dead.

I remember after seeing them live, a guy from some online magazine asked me what me and my friend thought the meaning of this song was and i remembered what torquil said "I hope that is where we all see each other in our bed room after this war yeah? after this war? we will meet you there and we will start again right? we will start again!" It was really touching

I'm convinced this is another breakup song.

Stars, a great band, is never a very political band. Their strongest songs aren't even romantic, they're somehow anti-romantic, problem-romantic: Elevator Love Letter, Your Ex-Lover Is Dead. No one else sings songs like this: Cheerful, and somehow lustily negaitve. This is as bad as it might get ("I don't think she'll know/that I'm saying 'goodbye'"), but there's the pleasure in telling it intelligent and straight.

So I was biking through Central Park, about 10:30 at night, just turning onto Central Park West, when this song came on my iPod. And I had to stop, because it made me choke up. The first stanza, about waking up, seemed so clearly to be about waking up, on the first mornning "after" -- the girl is gone, the relationnship finished; that flat, settled feeling. You can "say good morning to/ the sleepy person lying next to you," which of course would be nice. But if there's no one there "at least the war is over."

It made me think of the great Cowboy Junkies song "Sun Comes UP, It's Tuesday Morning," which is also about waking up on the first morning after a relationship has ended.

Relationships -- and especially relationsihps in Stars territory -- can degenerate into a kind of polite, couple warfare: Who's right, who's wrong, what should we do, what kind of people ought we to be, why haven't you changed, why haven't I improved? What have we gotten wrong about each other, what should we fix, why have we failed in that fix? It's a kind of war, and when the fights start it feels like a country in war times: alarm, offensives, assaults.

And this song, to me, is about that first morning. The TV is on, the weather is out there: you don't have to worry about judging another person you deeply, competitively care about -- you don't have to worry about being judged, either. You can "stay that way for the rest of the day" -- lazy as hell -- and no one is going to come into at 5 in the afternoon and lift their eyebrows. You are no longer worry about being criiticized -- or, just as bad, being the one stuck doing the ciriticizing. You can do what you want: the bells ring, the birds sing. And at least, the war is over.

And the repeating stanzas in the middle trace the woman in the song leaving: a calm final night: sink, broadcasts, sleep. And then she's gone, with the pinch of dread at night because you know in the morning it'll be the new, ammended, minus-one-person life.

"We won, or we think we did" -- the thought's similar to the woman's part of "You Ex-Lover Is Dead": "It's nothing but time and a face that you lose/I chose to feel it and you couldn't chose....I'll send you a postcard from a house down the road from real love." The speaker knows he's gotten what he wanted: so he's won, but he's lost too. But at least, the war's over.

Okay. Someone, who's heard the record, tell me: does it feel like a musical to you, too?

Between this, Personal, Barricade, and The Night Starts Here, the whole record sounds like it's a musical. It's really great, I like the feeling a lot.

Yes, it does feel like a musical.

Someone should write a script.

this song is great, i love the stars. i'm still trying to figure out what the song means though..

having just finished HP and the Deathly Hallows, this song keeps reminding me of it VERY strongly. :P

to inconsistentme... thank GOD you said that about Harry Potter, haha... so glad I'm not the only one who feels the same way! I've been listening to this song on repeat while reading... incredible.

The band is just called "stars" not "the stars", sorry that just really bothers me. But it is like a musical and I love this as a closing track.

Haha I can definitely see the HP thing. And I do love how themed this album is. All of the songs mesh really well.