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Little Fat Baby Lyrics
did you save your wisdom teeth?
did you burn your christmas tree?
he got dragged by a donkey
through the dust and the myrtle
but he was once a little fat baby
did you lose your [fatty?] in the bath?
did you make the city slickers laugh?
he got dragged by a donkey
through the glass and the myrtle
but he was once a little fat baby
did you burn your wisdom teeth?
did you save your christmas tree?
he got dragged by a donkey
through the switches and the myrtle
but he was once a little fat baby
did you burn your christmas tree?
through the dust and the myrtle
but he was once a little fat baby
did you make the city slickers laugh?
through the glass and the myrtle
but he was once a little fat baby
did you save your christmas tree?
through the switches and the myrtle
but he was once a little fat baby
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I first saw this in the last.fm description for the song, and after some google-ing stumbled across an article that suggests it is (at least partially) about Vic Chesnutt:
Poignantly, Linkous would add “borrowed lines” from his dear friend Vic Chesnutt to the tenth track, ‘Little Fat Baby.’ The Vic Chesnutt song in question was ‘Myrtle’. The following is ‘Myrtle’s last verse:
“I’m not an optimist, I’m not a realist I might be a subrealist but I can’t substantiate It was bigger than me and I felt like a sick child Dragged by a donkey, through the myrtle” (–‘Myrtle’, taken from Vic Chesnutt’s 1996 album ‘About to Choke’)
Linkous would incorporate ‘Myrtle’ (across each verse) into ‘Little Fat Baby’:
“He got dragged by a donkey Through the dust and the myrtle But he was once a little fat baby” (–‘Little Fat Baby’, taken from the Sparklehorse 2001 album ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’)
http://fracturedair.com/2013/01/15/the-last-waltz-mark-linkous/
This is one of my favorite Sparklehorse songs.
I'm not even going to try to field what this song is about, because Lord knows my guess wouldn't even be slightly close. Because what I think what this is about is probably so far off base that it's pathetic.
But it's still good. This song, I mean.
I feel like this song is, for lack of a better explanation, about looking back on one's life. Obviously it wasn't a particularly easy life (getting pulled through dirt, glass and brush against their will; laughed at by city folk for being different presumably) but the narrator is realizing he/she was once a innocent "little fat baby" without a care or a worry, and now they've grown up and are now bruised, possibly cold and bitter about the hardships they've encountered. Saving wisdom teeth I assume has to do with growning older, as far as burning the xmas tree, I don't have a clue (is this tradition somewhere?).
Who knows what Linkous was expressing, maybe he's not even really sure. All I'm sure of is my love of this song, and Sparklehorse in general. There's something about beautiful melancholy music that strikes a chord with my heart and I'll be damned if I can help that.
Religious reference? Yeah, I'd like to think so.
One of if not my favorite Sparklehorse songs.
pretty sure this song is really about looking at someone who has suffered at miserable life or death-- it seems like it's about the death of someone being "dragged by a donkey," but that's probably metaphor. the striking thing is to consider that that man, whatever he's done in his life, whether he deserved this end or not, he was once just an innocent baby that everyone would coo over.