I thought this song was about the kind of malaise and restlessness you get from having a load of problems pile up, like in Act of the Apostle I where the girl's mother is sick and she's losing focus. In this song, the singer's a "genius" and a "prodigy", but he doesn't seem to care about those things. He's lost his sense of sureness and security about life: like in the lines "The city was losing its appeal" and "Oh, if I could make sense of it all!" and he's trying to rediscover what made him tick by getting into outside things like an 'Independent' and the bible. But at the same time, the singer realizes that the only way to regain that security and sense of "I've-got-everything-figured-out" is to look inside himself. The "God" he's searching for is in his past; "back in her village, in the fields." Btw, I think that the singer in the first part of the song and the girl in the second part are the same person, in that they have the same feelings and problems.
... Wow, that's really long and rambling. But hell, I'm the first commenter. ...Sometimes I feel like I relate to this song so completely. :) Belle and Sebastian, simply put, are amazing.
I thought this song was about the kind of malaise and restlessness you get from having a load of problems pile up, like in Act of the Apostle I where the girl's mother is sick and she's losing focus. In this song, the singer's a "genius" and a "prodigy", but he doesn't seem to care about those things. He's lost his sense of sureness and security about life: like in the lines "The city was losing its appeal" and "Oh, if I could make sense of it all!" and he's trying to rediscover what made him tick by getting into outside things like an 'Independent' and the bible. But at the same time, the singer realizes that the only way to regain that security and sense of "I've-got-everything-figured-out" is to look inside himself. The "God" he's searching for is in his past; "back in her village, in the fields." Btw, I think that the singer in the first part of the song and the girl in the second part are the same person, in that they have the same feelings and problems.
... Wow, that's really long and rambling. But hell, I'm the first commenter. ...Sometimes I feel like I relate to this song so completely. :) Belle and Sebastian, simply put, are amazing.