This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
They're shining searchlights in the sky
'Cause there's a new God in the sign
It says their map is not their terrier work
And then I broke my telescope
But that's the nature of the game
And you have to play
Bring back the pain of a god that's never blue
You're in control of the whole damned universe
Bring back the shame and the bright lights on a few
It keeps me coming back to you
The deaths were faked, the laughs were cries
But ressurrections are doing fine
You got me walking into suicide
And I'll be there right by your side
In reproduction at your merry go bye bye
Here to paradise they go
Brighter made is their woe
As above, so below
We reached for an outside point of view
But its out of touch with me and you
I feel I'm walking into suicide
But you'll be right there by my side
To beam my message into space as I die
Bring back the shame of the many for the few
Get on your knees and I'll be coming back to you
Bring back the pain of an inverse world for two
It keeps me coming back to you
'Cause there's a new God in the sign
It says their map is not their terrier work
And then I broke my telescope
But that's the nature of the game
And you have to play
Bring back the pain of a god that's never blue
You're in control of the whole damned universe
Bring back the shame and the bright lights on a few
It keeps me coming back to you
The deaths were faked, the laughs were cries
But ressurrections are doing fine
You got me walking into suicide
And I'll be there right by your side
In reproduction at your merry go bye bye
Here to paradise they go
Brighter made is their woe
As above, so below
We reached for an outside point of view
But its out of touch with me and you
I feel I'm walking into suicide
But you'll be right there by my side
To beam my message into space as I die
Bring back the shame of the many for the few
Get on your knees and I'll be coming back to you
Bring back the pain of an inverse world for two
It keeps me coming back to you
Lyrics submitted by Fear_Of_Mole_Rats, edited by MistahBungle
Merry Go Bye Bye Lyrics as written by
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Go to the second question in this interview for the backstory of this song.
blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm
I've created an account on here just so that I could reply to this post. I want to say... THANK YOU IamZanders! Anyone curious about this song should definitely read the backstory provided in that interview.
Thanks, dude!
interesting interview, i cant tell if he's a genius or a crackpot, probably somewhere in between as most of the best musicians are (frank zappa, sun ra)<br /> <br /> One thing is for certain though, he was the creative force behind bungle, not mike patton. the way he talks, it has bungle written all over it.
@IamZanders I do hope you or anyone else who got a chance to read that piece before the link went dead can help me out. What did it say?
@IamZanders god dammit, the link went dead, deleted, evaporated, disappeared. please tell me what the heck did it say lI:
@IamZanders
@IamZanders does anyone know what it means just please tell me
@IamZanders Found it archived at archive.is/ijM9<br /> <br /> -------<br /> <br /> Trey Spruance interview, September 2008<br /> Part 2 of an interview with Trey Spruance from the site 'Rey por un Dia, Un Tributo A Mike Patton' (reyporundia.phplibre.com.es/modules/news/index.php). My favourite part of the interview.<br /> <br /> What can you tell us about the period of rehearsals, demos and recording of 'Disco Volante'? Does your departure from Faith No More affected the recording process of that record, or you get along well?<br /> <br /> Nah, that part was fine. Mike didn't even want me to be in Faith No More in the first place, so there was no problem there. The rehearsals were more like "arrangement sessions". Usually two of us working together on arrangement in one room, while two or three screwed around and went nuts in the other. We developed the idea of "snakes", essentially through-compositions with recurring sequences --- pretty much like we had always done, but by then becoming quite exact. We started concentrating on "transitional" material that we used to get between parts we KNEW had to be there in a certain sequence; and then these transitions would end up recurring etc. There was very little "instrumental rehearsal" --- there never was in Mr. Bungle. The band was compositionally-oriented from the ground up, and our instruments as well as all the technical problems that needed to be overcome, were all servicing the goal of the composition. Only rarely did we "hash out parts" --- almost never was there "woodshedding". We only really learned songs AFTER they were recorded, and then too, it was usually about "how do we get this keyboard to trigger that midi channel and then switch halfway through" etc, and then trying to make it all fit together. A very "non-attatched to personal talent" band. It was really great that way. I've definitely never seen anything like it, before, during or since.<br /> <br /> For years, I have been fascinated by the song "Merry Go Bye Bye", even more when I found that the noise section in the middle of the song was featured in the "Stereo Test Record Vol. 1" CD released in 1995 by Indiscreet Records, under the title 'Millers Higher Life'. What can you tell us about this track and it's introduction on "Disco Volante"? Has anyone ask you this question before?<br /> <br /> Well, I guess my own psychic irruptions in that period speak most loudly in that song. I'd made that section as an electro-acoustic composition on very primitive equipment, in a flurry of psychic distress in around 1993. You could say I was contending with some psychisms... perhaps some demonisms I had opened myself up to by seeking to pry the universe open by force. So that piece became haunted with that for me, and I put it away. Later on, having gotten a little perspective, I was kind of in the middle of writing a song about that period in 1993, when I was asked to contribute a piece for that comp. I pulled, that electroacoustic composition out & mixed it. A few days later, still only having a vague idea of the "ironic" song I was writing, and still having no lyrics, I was laying in the bathtub and all the lyrics for it came to me at once, written in a blaze of five minutes. It was then that I knew that the song must be torn open and that haunted piece must irrupt into it...<br /> <br /> I actually quite regret the Faustian audacity of all that (I even put a lot of the arrangement together in editing as a "surprise" for the rest of the band to find out about). The worst thing is that one of my friends did a stage dive while we played that song at our concert on the turn of the millennium and hit his head hard. And knowing nothing of the song's genesis and meaning, he basically went schizo on it for a long time, wandering around San Francisco telling people all the mysterious shit that was wrapped up in those lyrics, and asking me every time I saw him what all the different meanings were as if his life depended on the answers... here I was being haunted by that shit again seven years later, but worse was that someone ELSE now had the problem. I couldn't pretend like there was nothing to it, but worse was the feeling that I had infected him with something that was gripping his soul with that song. Man, you gotta be really careful... I have been anything but careful, of course.
@IamZanders Thank you Sam!