Ahead By A Century

To me, this is a man who is with a woman out of his league. Maybe not physically out of his league, but spiritually and emotionally. Much more evolved. He gets "stung", and has an epiphany of sorts, where he realizes this. He knows he is unable to meet her on her plane of existence. She is ahead by a century. He will only fall consistently short.

To me this song is about a relationship built on fantasy more than reality. The Hip is from Kingston and I went to Queen's University. Post-graduation, I fell for a guy in that town. The Hip seemed to become a meaningful band, to where if we heard them we'd think of each other. There is a mural in downtown Kingston on the waterfront - I don't know if it's still there - that has the opening lyrics to this song painted on it. Me and that guy, I think, genuinely cared a lot about each other. But looking back, I think things were kind of doomed from the start. I think we both inadvertently ended up hurting each other because we held on to the fantasy. Two people who really care about each other but circumstances had other plans. We ultimately couldn't get on the same page - and probably disappointed each other. I was the kind of person who, through losses, led with the notion that life is short and to not let good things get away. It's a tough pill to swallow that life doesn't always work that way - some things come down to other factors or right timing and you can't just will it to work out - no matter how hard you try. That's just life sometimes, we can't control it, and I guess that's what makes it even more precious when two people choose each other and can remain together.

i always saw this as being about a guy and a girl being in love, the guy is remebering when they were kids while the chick is all in the present.....meaning she is ahead by a century......

For me, this song is about a man being nostalgic about the early part of his relationship. Now, however, he is no longer happy. His wife is consistently disappointed with him. The hornets represent the realities of life in the paradise dream of sitting in a tree. Reality produces regret and doubt and a want to get out.

Not really sure what smoking the out is about. Not sure if he wants to clear the air (smoking out revenge and doubt), or he is realizing that they're headed for another fight (smoking the hornets out of the nest so they can be stung again).

I believe the song is about dreaming as a young child, and thinking about how amazing growing up would be, then reality (or the hornet) stings you, and you start to become less optimistic as your problems or "rain" fall on you in real time, and you have no way to deal with a lot of them.

Part of Gord Downie's genius, of course, is that you can love a song like this without really getting it. It's a poetic masterpiece. And he doesn't talk about it, of course, instead letting the work speak for itself - part of the mark of a true artist.

The first thing to pay attention to is the overall dichotomy between dreams and reality. "Illusions of someday cast in a golden light" versus serious and feverish dreams, all in opposition to the rain that "falls in real time".

The hornet sting, followed by nightmares of 'revenge and doubt', is a pretty straightforward symbol of what Hamlet referred to as "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks which flesh is heir to" - getting pulled away from optimistic hopes and dreams by the various pains and challenges of life, some internal (stirring up "doubts") and others external (triggering thoughts of "revenge"). Smoking them out (as in, how people used to try to drive out hornets) is a way of trying to refocus on the good dreams, without getting sidetracked by the difficulties of life - which are just as illusory (dreams) as the original 'illusions of someday'.

The first verse is easy - it's a recollection of two young people (perhaps romantically involved; perhaps not; I don't think it matters) dreaming together about an optimistic ('golden light') future that would never come ('illusions of someday').

But the second verse is much more difficult to interpret, because it has layered meanings. Pay attention to the 'time' references in the second verse - real time, morning, day, night. This isn't accidental, and I think there's some intentional confusion of the timeline, interspersing current reality with memory.

Superficially, there seems to be an element of finding one's way in the real world, contrasting against the dreams of the first verse (and chorus). The 'morning shroud' is the fog or mist in the morning obscuring vision. The day begins and the mist clears, and we can see, but the rain isn't quite what we had dreamed in the first verse.

But it runs deeper than that. The word choice of 'shroud' is potent, because it carries other meanings - namely, as a piece of cloth laid over the deceased's face at a funeral in some traditions. So staring in the morning shroud is, I think, a death image. (I've pondered other interpretations here. Could it be a specific shroud? The shroud of Turin? There's no other religious imagery to support that. Or sometimes the mist rising from the Horseshoe Falls is referred to as a 'shroud' - given TTH's propensity for alluding to Canadian landmarks, could this be a Niagara reference? Perhaps 'ahead by a century' could be a reference to the erosion of the falls? With all the water references, it seemed worth considering, but ultimately it's too disparate from the rest of the imagery in the song.)

Death imagery isn't always literal. Sometimes it's about change, new beginnings out of a loss - and given that 'morning' is also a 'new beginning' image, the 'morning shroud' seems doubly so. But in this case, I think there's a literal element to the death. The friend passed away, leaving me to navigate the real world and its challenges on my own.

But there was conflict. The tilted cloud/hand lyrics are perhaps the toughest lyrics in the song to grasp, because we're getting outside of any recognizable metaphors, but I think we're talking about conflict. The friend remained a dreamer - in the clouds, and the narrator tried to knock him or her into reality by tilting the cloud. The 'tilted hand' is, I suspect, an inversion of the image of the even hand (for fairness and cool tempers) - basically an acknowledgement that I was unfair to you, but you pushed my buttons to get me there.

This makes the most, and the best, sense of the title lyric: It's an acknowledgement of having been wrong all along. All this time has passed, and only now am I figuring out what you knew all along: Shed revenge and doubt, and pursue your dreams.

(The alternative interpretation I've been weighing a little bit is that the friend's death is the hornet sting, both shaking the narrator from youthful naivete and simultaneously crystallizing the memory of the optimist friend. I can still make sense of the tilted hand in much the same way - I deal with others with less of an even hand because of my anger at what happened to you - but I have a much harder time figuring out the cloud lyric.)

So there's a sense of hope, of moving back to optimism, of pursuing one's dreams ("tonight we smoke them out"), but also a sense of frustration, that it's so hard to do, when it seemed to come so easily to that childhood friend who died while still an optimist. ("disappointing you is getting me down")

Here's my interpretation on the song "Ahead by a Century". Two people (Friend/first and singer/second) are having a philosophical conversation about the afterlife (Illusion of someday [that's] cast in a golden light). The Friend comments that there's "No dress rehearsal. This is our life". Indicating that they think the real life is the one we are currently living. The Afterlife is just a promise/ illusion and may not be real. And that's when the hornet (uncomfortable idea and their consequences) stung the singer and causes them to question their beliefs in a panic (Feverish Dream). "With revenge and doubt", the singer commits to restore their faith in their beliefs (revenge) and remove these doubts ("Tonight we smoke them out"). In the Chinese culture, "A century" is a synonym for "eternity" or "A Lifetime". Thus when the singer states "You are ahead by a Century", they indicate that the friend may be living the "real life" where the singer is living "this life" (and not the reality of the afterlife). Alternative, it may take the singer a lifetime to "catch up" to his friend with regards to living the "real life". A shroud is a veil placed over the face of the dead. The morning is the end of the time of Dreaming. Thus to "Stare in the morning shroud" is the singer confronting the possible end of the their belief in the "illusion of someday"/ afterlife. "And then the day began" indicates the singer's dream of the afterlife has ended. "I tilted your Clouds. You tilted my hand." - The singer is commenting on how little the singer is affecting the friend relative to how the much the Friend's idea is affecting him. (The clouds are ephemeral and far away whereas the hands are close by and solid).
"Rain falls in real time. Rain falls through the night." - The singer is recognizing that there is non positive attributes to both the "real life" and the promised "afterlife". This allows the singer to better accept the friend's comments. Now his dream is "serious" instead of "feverish". The song is open to whether the singer continues on this train of thought or returns to their original beliefs in the second verse. The "hornet" still refers to the discomforting ideas. But it is open as to whether the idea being smoked out is the Friend's comments or the singer's original beliefs. By repeating "You are ahead by a century." six times, the singer is lamenting how the the singer cannot bring themself to "catch up" to their friend, or the singer is thanking their Friend for the Friend's clarity. I think that it is the former possibility as in last line is the singer is disappointing his friend. The last line also indicate that the Friend and the Singer genuinely care for one another despite the difference in their philosophical stances.

[Edit: Added interpretation of "I tilted your clouds. You tilted my hand."]

What the hell, no comments??? sick ass song!

This song kicks serious ass. I'm not quite sure of the meaning, though. Something about childhood nostalgia, I'm sure.

I think this is the best soft song ever