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Mother of the World Lyrics
In and out and in and out again
In and out and in and out again
And where are you now
O Mother of the world
While we feed from your hands
and we drink from your filth and your oil
So send them down
to scrape and suck the soil
Keep us safe inside
your damp and rusty coil
In and out and in and out again
In and out and in and out again
Mother's son
Mother of senseless things
Mother come
Kill time as it begins
In and out and in and out again
O Mother of the world
and we drink from your filth and your oil
to scrape and suck the soil
your damp and rusty coil
In and out and in and out again
Mother of senseless things
Kill time as it begins
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Ok I think I've listened to this enough times to give a fair opinion of it:
So basically the first half of the song is the band playing the same riff over and over again with Michael Gira breathing in and out of the mic. I don't know about others, but the breathing combined with the idea of "Mother" makes me think of giving birth. Since the song is called Mother of the World, the woman giving birth is literally Mother Nature, and she is giving birth to the world/universe/whatever.
After the first part of the song we are left with just the piano, some strumming, and drums. It's relatively calm compared to the first half and so I would say that this symbolizes the birth being over. The piano gives off a primordial and just really empty feeling, like I see the universe at a young age, without humans and without life perhaps.
Gira comes in and has noticed the absence of the mother, as if she doesn't appear to have anything to do with the world after creating it, she just leaves it:
"And where are you now O Mother of the world"
Michael then seems to give some imagery of how he sees life:
"While we feed from your hands and we drink from your filth and your oil"
He's wondering where the mother has gone, why she's seemed to abandon her "child", perhaps a feeling of being betrayed by God for not feeling him/her presence in his life... I'm not sure. I like that he uses the word "filth" because really all life eventually just feeds off the corpses and shit of other life through some traversing of the food chain.
"In and out and in and out again In and out and in and out again
Mother's son Mother of senseless things
Mother come Kill time as it begins"
I think the "in and out" part just characterizes the repetitive aspect of nature, which he perhaps sees as never-ending and infinite. She is the mother of senseless things because he doesn't really see a point to it all. He then begs the mother to come and "kill time as it begins". If it's pointless why not just end it before it starts instead of letting it run on forever?
I think of nature.