Voodoo Lady

"I was thirsty for everything, but water wasn't my style."

Such a cool lyric.

Yeah, it really is a great lyric. It sort of summarizes much of the conflict the speaker experiences in this song, as well as in "Where Fishes Go," "Face and Ghost," and "Feel the Quiet River Rage." Specifically, a mixture of apathy and fear at the prospect of actually comitting himself to love. In this song he is being seduced by apathy. The Voodoo lady tells him:

"calm the fuck down you got a serious side to you that could give the whole world a frown now nothin' really matters to me you see check out these holes in my gown let your eyes lose their focus a little let your guard come down"

He puts off the decision to choose "water" (life, spirit) or "blood" (spiritless flesh, death) by deciding that neither is really his "style." But fundamental metaphysical matters of how you look at life and how you live are not matters where you'd say "Eh, that's not really my style."

Alright, the way I've always interpreted the Distance to Here is it's an album about a guy's quest to find the truth about religions. Basically, a search for God, songs like the Distance and Face and Ghost make me think this. Here's what I think about Voodoo Lady:

On his quest for God the narrator has stopped on a sidequest to be with a voodoo lady. He discovers she is a hooker and considers sleeping with her, the first verse is him retelling what she first said to him. He gets suspicious and suspects that she may be wanting to drug him then slit his throat (hey they do it sometimes). The chorus is when he doesn't accept a drink from her and tells her he's never done anything like that before, she tells him that she'll show him how.

The second verse is her getting the idea that he's caught on to her game, maybe she accidentally flashes her blades to him, but with her being a hooker/voodoo lady that he's never met before tonight, she could be dangerous and would want to kill him right there. So he starts to realize she's crazy and that he himself could be crazy, he realizes how fortunate he is that he isn't the one in her shoes, hence the line "I could be a voodoo lady, just a classy hooker playing the field".

He tells her he's got to go for some reason, but gives her the idea that he'll come back later that night, so she waits. The beautiful song underneath the sound line could represent him seeing what her intentions really were underneath her offering him sex and a drink.

The final part of the song is him realizing what had just happened, and that if he was going to die he didn't want to do it by choking on his own blood. Then once he's gotten away from this woman he wonders if the whole thing really happened or if he just dreamed it up.

That's just my late night look at another one of Live's songs. If it doesn't make sense I apologize.

when I was manic I thought this song was about Jesus and Mary Magdelene (the hooker in the Bible.) The verses are about Mary talking to Jesus and the chorus is Jesus thinking to himself. "We" have to show "me" how. We = the Trinity? Me = Jesus?

It makes the song pretty cool if you consider this theory.

I see it as being more simple than all that. it's about temptation and the realisation that there is a thirst for the forbidden within and the struggle against base desire,