The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid

I didn't think Colin would ever arrange a sexier female vocalist than Laura Veirs on Yankee Bayonette. He did it with Shara Worden and this insane song.

William has been spending time with Margaret, and the Queen finds out and isn't happy about it. It seems that she has been scorned by the world of men, and when she finds William as a child, abandoned in a river, she swears to love him as her own, but never submit him to what she sees as a horrible, unloving race. So when William, whose wanted to connect with one of his own kind, begs for just one last night to spend with the first woman he's known and come to love, he says "you owe me life" or, you've kept me to yourself your whole life, and I've never had a chance to really live, you owe me this one chance. So because she really does love him, she allows him this once, but then he'll never again be allowed to mingle with men.

William/The Faun is truly in love with Margaret, as evidenced by the fact that he gives his life to the river for his love. And what's a story without a tragic hero, and the title of the album can't possibly refer to the dangers of unsafe sex.

The Queen (as any mother would) wanted to shield William from the "hazards of love." William makes the deal under the pretense of wanting a good fuck, while the "Wanting" to which he actually refers is his yearning to spend time with his child and love (even as he realizes he is not of the human world and will eventually have to part with them).

BUT by the time he returns, his lover will have been taken by the Rake (who actually acts on the sexual impulse William feigns), thus giving a new, more urgent purpose to his night out.

AAH! AAAH! [Decemberist Spazz]

"How it precedes you like a black smoke, oh"

I could be wrong (I've misplaced my CD case recently), but it seems to me this line is: "How it precedes you like a black smoke pall"

A pall is "anything that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom." That certainly fits with the context of these first couple of stanzas, and after listening to it several times, I'm pretty sure I hear "pall."

I think the talk about "waves" in this song is foreshadowing to their demise later in the story.

I can't believe how metal I feel when this gets me headbangin'.

I think this about his forest queen and her son making a bargain about his wanting to go out into the real world i'm not a big stage dork, but this song sounds beautiful.

One thing - William, while the Forest Queen has given hom the form of a fawn during the day, is a man, or at least was born human. He says: "You delivered me from danger then" (i.e. when he was sent adrift like baby Moses),

and so when he says "Swore to save me from the world of men"

he means she gave him an escape from the cruel world by taking him as her son rather than letting him die on the river, not that she protected him (her natural son) from the human world. The fact that he's her adopted son that she's gone out of her way to save is what motivates her anger at how her love was "repaid".

Her voice is so haunting with the guitar behind it - I love it!