This song is really excellent. What a story! Sorry this comment is so long, but I got carried away. :-)
At the beginning of the song, we find out that the narrator's mother and his biological father are not together. It seems likely that they had a fling and broke up when she got pregnant. The separation was messy, and his mother doesn't have any fond memories of it. They hadn't known each other for very long; she knows nothing about his family.
He would love to research his family and know more about his father. He wants peace of mind and the satisfaction of knowing about half of who he is. His mother's excuse for not doing so is that she doesn't have the money for it.
I love the wordplay in the chorus. "Relative is relative," meaning that when one talks about his presumed sibling(s) and father as "relatives," that's less true for him than is is for them, since they're only his half-siblings and his step-father. As he clarifies, "relative's not relevant in my case." (I don't know if this song is autobiographical, but if it is, he mentions that he has a sister in "Stories and Charts.")
Then we have the beautiful wordplay on "open" and "shut":
"and my case is
not closed and open to interpretation or a point of view"
Great repetition of "my case," and this time he's using a different idiom, "open and closed case," a term usually used in police work meaning that everything is clearly understood and there's nothing to investigate.
But he inverts the idiom, reinforcing that his situation is the opposite of open and closed. Finally, he chains on another cliché, "open to interpretation." And this is true, he, his biological father and his mother all feel different things about the situation as it stands and the choices that were made many years ago.
Finally, the last sentence of the chorus is great. It keeps the repetition theme going. His father will stay foreign (unknown) until he's found and the narrator can finally learn something about him.
The second verse starts out with him letting us know he doesn't even know his father's last name. That's going to make finding him nearly impossible.
Instead of feeling warm affection toward his mother, he feels frustrated. Not knowing about his father has ruined his relationship with her, because he blames her for not keeping in touch with him.
The last verse is his fantasy about how he can get closure by finding his father. But the last sentence is bitter: he is mad that he's the only one of the three of them (him, father, mother) that seems to want to reconnect. The "you" in this verse is directed at his father. It brings the father into the picture, which has mostly been a dispute between the mother and her son, just in time to let him share the blame for losing touch.
This song reminds me a whole lot of "Sucker Punch" by The Pale Pacific. (Another really great song that you should go find right now.) They touch on similar themes, though that song is a bit more enigmatic. But they both end with a frustrated lack of understanding: how could a father not want to know about his children?
This song is really excellent. What a story! Sorry this comment is so long, but I got carried away. :-)
At the beginning of the song, we find out that the narrator's mother and his biological father are not together. It seems likely that they had a fling and broke up when she got pregnant. The separation was messy, and his mother doesn't have any fond memories of it. They hadn't known each other for very long; she knows nothing about his family.
He would love to research his family and know more about his father. He wants peace of mind and the satisfaction of knowing about half of who he is. His mother's excuse for not doing so is that she doesn't have the money for it.
I love the wordplay in the chorus. "Relative is relative," meaning that when one talks about his presumed sibling(s) and father as "relatives," that's less true for him than is is for them, since they're only his half-siblings and his step-father. As he clarifies, "relative's not relevant in my case." (I don't know if this song is autobiographical, but if it is, he mentions that he has a sister in "Stories and Charts.")
Then we have the beautiful wordplay on "open" and "shut":
"and my case is not closed and open to interpretation or a point of view"
Great repetition of "my case," and this time he's using a different idiom, "open and closed case," a term usually used in police work meaning that everything is clearly understood and there's nothing to investigate.
But he inverts the idiom, reinforcing that his situation is the opposite of open and closed. Finally, he chains on another cliché, "open to interpretation." And this is true, he, his biological father and his mother all feel different things about the situation as it stands and the choices that were made many years ago.
Finally, the last sentence of the chorus is great. It keeps the repetition theme going. His father will stay foreign (unknown) until he's found and the narrator can finally learn something about him.
The second verse starts out with him letting us know he doesn't even know his father's last name. That's going to make finding him nearly impossible.
Instead of feeling warm affection toward his mother, he feels frustrated. Not knowing about his father has ruined his relationship with her, because he blames her for not keeping in touch with him.
The last verse is his fantasy about how he can get closure by finding his father. But the last sentence is bitter: he is mad that he's the only one of the three of them (him, father, mother) that seems to want to reconnect. The "you" in this verse is directed at his father. It brings the father into the picture, which has mostly been a dispute between the mother and her son, just in time to let him share the blame for losing touch.
This song reminds me a whole lot of "Sucker Punch" by The Pale Pacific. (Another really great song that you should go find right now.) They touch on similar themes, though that song is a bit more enigmatic. But they both end with a frustrated lack of understanding: how could a father not want to know about his children?