The Caves of Altamira

This song is brilliant and has a ton of interpretations and meanings.

There's the narrative, a story of a man who reflects upon his childhood, of seeing ancient paintings in a cave and being in awe of it. Simple art, yet so profoundly does it strike him as child. "Made alive a worldly wonder... Every man and beast appeared A friend as real as I." The narrator goes on to describe how all of this was done before "Hollywood", or before a time when art was made for profit, and instead "they heard the call" and made the art because of an urge deep down within them. The narrator then revisits the site as an adult, but to his dismay, its lost all of the charm it once had when he was child. It's now just simple cave drawings, "A wooly man without a face And a beast without a name ".

I think this story has a bit of subtext as well. The story describes the sort of charm art can lose as we grow into adult hood. This can be applicable to any sort of movie or book you read as a kid, that just isn't as imaginative as you once perceived it.

The second meaning lies in the chorus, he describes the art written on the wall as being so impactful because it was created in a time before the commercialization of art. It was created for arts sake, there was no monetary gain, it was just the pure imagination of the people drawing it, who were only driven by some sort of call to do so.

Finally, I think the interpretations sort of interconnect here. As children, we tend to draw, create stories etc just for the fun of it, there's no gain, we just do it because it's what feels right. As an adult, motivations tend to differ, and our imaginations ultimately teeter. And just like art throughout human civilization has perhaps lost that value through time, so do we in our adulthood.