Saved These Words

What a splendid way to end the masterpiece that is, in my opinion, Once I Was An Eagle. This song is brilliant - so beautiful and at times so calm but also so overwhelming.

One of the main themes of the album, as it has been pointed out in Pitchfork's review of the LP, is Marling's treatment of love, and how she has evolved regarding this matter since her first album. If you remember well, although "Ghosts" sounded very mature in the way it depicted love and acknowledged the fact that it very seldom lasts forever ("Lover, please do not fall to your knees / It's not like I believe in ever-lasting love"), Laura was also the kind of girl who could easily get too excited about a relationship and realize what she felt was not strong enough (see the beginning of "New Romantic," for example: "I know I said I love you but I'm thinking I was wrong, / I'm the first to admit that I'm still pretty young, / And I never meant to hurt you when I wrote you ten love songs.").

Once I Was An Eagle seems to have gone beyond this idea and be way more thoughtful about love and what it means to be with someone and to "love" him or her. I think that "Saved These Words" is the song that embodies the best this idea: whereas the album started as a kind of post-breakup situation ("You should be gone beast, be gone from my mind at least" and "when we *were" in love, I was an eagle and you were a dove"), the narrator evolved and went through a lot of emotions and situations (such as the strong and fierce "Master Hunter" or the delicate and very sensitive "Little Love Caster," who, unsurprisingly, follows the former and shows how unstable the narrator feels at the moment) and finally found harmony: if this love story did not last it is mainly because it was not meant to be, and that there will be other lovers worth of hearing "these words," which are the most-famous "I love you," as I reckon.

I really like the way the song starts, with the guitar slowly introducing the song and Marling's voice uttering what seems to be the end of the narrator's quest. By the way, it is hard to know who is the narrator: is it someone we have already heard of in the album, such as Undine or Rosie, is it Laura Marling herself - although she has stated that her lyrics rarely are confessional -, or is it a kind of deity or something else that leads to a state of grace?

However, the way love is described in this song is really interesting and states the human inability to dominate and control it. It is "not always easy" nor "fun," and, most of all, after all that internal struggle between what the narrator feels and shows and which has been shown throughout the album, s/he has come to realize that "love is better dumb:" there is no good way to explain or to phrase it, since that, in this case, "words are sleazy."

Once this has been accepted, the song moves to a more emphatic feature, with the guittar strumming becoming more effective and leading to the kind of chorus that can be found in the song. The narrator wonders if s/he and/or his/her lover "should choose to love anyone anytime soon," which, I think, is a rhetorical question, the answer being yes, and that love being maybe right around the corner, for both of them, and not only for one of them.

I also like the way in which Marling's narrator addresses his/her naivety, because, basically, "New Romantic" is about naivety, but lately, naivety seems to have been "failing" him/her (remember, the narrator is a "Master Hunter," who "cured [his/her] skin" so that "nothing gets in"), which is now seen as a good thing, since it allows the narrator to know s/he truly wants and deserves, without getting lost in lost feelings and memories. Furthermore, that kind of address is typical in Marling's work, but it was usually aimed to a Greek goddess, in order to help the narrator, such as Hera ("What He Wrote") or "Sophia", goddess of wisdom, whilst here she is addressing herself. It it thus a movement from the outside to the inside, showing how the narrator has come to terms and seen that what s/he needs to be better is understand how s/he works.

Well, basically, that's it. I'm sorry for the long post, but I really love this song and have been listening to it a lot lately, since I'm trying to recover from a breakup that left me much more devastated than what I thought it would. Laura's helping me to understand that this love story was not a "curse," not at all, but that it showed me something new that I will for sure experience again in my life ('cause I'm also "the first to admit that I'm still pretty young"). So, thanks Laura!

I think it is words are sleazy,my love is better done. The lyrics on the album booklet is dumb, but several apparent mistakes of other lyrics on the booklet makes me suspicious of the verity of it. Done seems to me more fit to the song...