Softer, Softest

this song is so sad and heartbreaking. I just see it as a glimpse behind the wild woman that Courtney Love is into the hurt little girl inside.

My favorite line is

"I've got a blister from touching everything I see"

It means opening your soul up to someone and having it taken advantage of, stepped on, misunderstood, manipulated, or taken for granted. I love Courtney's lyrics.

"Ive got a blister from toughing everything I see" is my favorite.

I heard this was about Courtney getting bullied at school. I love when the distorted guitars come in about halfway through the song.

I guess I need psychiatric help, but to me this song is clearly about a young girl (P Girl) whose Mother (the witch) is abusive. She's abusive to the extent that she may allow her lover (boyfriend/husband) to abuse the child sexually or at least look the other way. The imagery of "sour milk" and "Your milk has a dick" is obviously her being forced to do things young girls shouldn't even have knowledge about. He gains her trust by allowing her to tell her things but then uses that to make her stay quiet as evident in the opening few lines. The "blister" bit is her sexual dysfunction as a result, she is "touching: excessively meaning herself and others because she has been psychologically traumatized and no longer understands what personal boundaries are because she is a child. "Makes me mind" is her retreat within herself to deal with the pain and horror.

I love this song; it's probably my favourite on LTT. I personally think it's about Courtney's childhood, being bullied and never feeling like she fitted in.

To me this is the song I listen to whenever I feel weak, overwhelmed, powerless. It is the ultimate song for providing empathy. I used to have a really bad eating disorder, in recovery this song was always there for me and helped me a lot.

'I've got a blister from touching everything I see'

To me this is a line of guilt: it represents suffering the consequences for interfering too much, for messing things up, for oing things wrong.

"I tell you everything, and I hope that you wont tell on me..." - shows trust in someone. "Pee-girl gets the belt" - abuse maybe? The "pee-girl" is on the back cover of 'Live Through This'. "I've got a blister from touching everything I see" - either as in "touching" everything (everyone) (getting around a lot) and it haunts her, like in her song 'Teenage Whore'. Or as in suffering the consequences (getting a blister) after interfering too much with "everything", and feeling guilty. As for the lines about milk, I'm not really sure. Unless its her mothers milk being "sour" or making her cry - her bad relationship with her mother maybe? This is a very sad, very beautiful song. And I'm not Courtney Love, so I don't know exactly what was going through her head when she wrote this. This is only what I hear.

Notice that each verse in this starts out with what is often called a "confessional" approach - Anne Sexton was a great exemplar of this type of lyrical form, and there is a resemblance in style. The very next portion after that is invariably a reference of harsh corporal punishment - get the belt - which results in a distressed and disturbed girl - "pee-girl". Then the milk recitation comes.

"Milk" is commonly understood as the essential nutrient for healthy life. Her constant reference of this deals with her fundamental needs, how they were met in a peculiar way, inadequately and not satisfactorily at all as to results. "Sour"? Unsatisfying and inadequate. etc. "Milk" having a "dick"? She met her needs through prostitution at one point in her teen years, until her dad kicked her out of the house for it. "Dye" - hiding herself behind the punk hair and make up she used in teen years. I suspect "old milk" could refer to genuinely mature parental figures, people who worked with her to change her behavior for the better or "mind", she encountered when she was in Oregon girl's reform school (which was actually, in the era she was resident there, a therapuetically oriented place, not like the nasty reform school girl prison exploitation movies would suggest).

Ultimately, this song is about self-realization of what she herself needs to acknowledge about herself - both emotionally and in self-image. "I tell you everything" is referring to private thoughts and allowing them back into her conscious awareness, allowing herself to feel what she is seeing clearly in the privacy of her thoughts - her heart touching things. People who have suffered from abuse might not be able to do this, to trust themselves to know what they really feel even, for a long time, until very late in life sometimes.

People who become teen prostitutes have a lot of very thick internal walls to be overcome at some point in life. She was doing this here, I think, and the song meaning is obscure to people who haven't been subject to extremely abusive and disturbing life events when young, as someone who becomes a "teenage whore" has, because they have not the experience of overcoming extreme internal cellularization or "walling off" of what they feel and how they view themselves. That's why it sounds so strange to many.

this song is definately about highschool if you look deep enough.

Some songs are never meant to be understood, and this is one of them. Part of me has always thought, like most people, that "pee girl" is Courtney referring to herself (probably as a child), but all of the other imagery is pure abstraction– the milk turning to cream, the milk crying, having a dye, having a dick... I honestly still have no clue what this song is about after years of speculation, but I do know this much: it's sorrowful and expresses some sort of seething, desperate pain– it's very, very sad, and very, very beautiful.