This song always makes me feel like it should be the ending of a story. I'll try to tell you about what I always imagine happening.
The narrator is a guy, and "she" actually refers to two different girls at different times. The "she" in the first line is a girl who is with him now. The two of them were in some sort of crash (I always imagined some kind of spaceship or hovercraft kind of thing), and they landed on a beach, and they're lying at the very edge of the ocean, just enough so there's about an inch of water on the ground when a wave's not coming in. At the beginning of the song, he wakes up, but she's still knocked out, and is "sleeping through the sound," not even waking to the sound of the waves on the beach. The two of them are lying back to back with their heads touching. He decides to "wake her when we're through," probably when he gets up and gets ready to take off again.
While he's lying there, he's remembering the events leading up to the crash and how they changed him. Then he thinks of "the sun brown girl," who is the "she" in "she rides a simple wave." I imagine her as a friend of his who died, and the "wave" is how he imagines her soul drifting away. He thinks of her watching him, and knows that since she can "see the way my heart is in it now," she's still watching him and giving him her blessing.
Then he sort of flashes back in to reality, where he's still lying on the beach, and the waves are washing over him. ("Over and over and over again, the water leans towards me, it cleans my hands and head.") He feels purified of whatever happened before, and he stands up. He resents the fact that he'll probably get a bunch of sympathy when he gets back home, so he hopes that they don't "fill the hours with empty words and thoughts that fail to tell me what I've seen." They can't grasp what he had been through, so they might as well just shut up. The girl he was with stands up, and they look out at the water, and in his head, he promises his old friend that he'll "wait on" her, and that they'll meet again after he dies.
The last part of the song is about his rejection of the violence he had to live with up until that point ("Please don't bring my gun inside"), his renewed resolve, ("Heart is in it now"), and his final goodbye to the girl that died ("She rides a simple wave.").
That's my weird take on it. (Some of the lyrics in my post are different than the ones above. The ones up there aren't right.)
This song always makes me feel like it should be the ending of a story. I'll try to tell you about what I always imagine happening.
The narrator is a guy, and "she" actually refers to two different girls at different times. The "she" in the first line is a girl who is with him now. The two of them were in some sort of crash (I always imagined some kind of spaceship or hovercraft kind of thing), and they landed on a beach, and they're lying at the very edge of the ocean, just enough so there's about an inch of water on the ground when a wave's not coming in. At the beginning of the song, he wakes up, but she's still knocked out, and is "sleeping through the sound," not even waking to the sound of the waves on the beach. The two of them are lying back to back with their heads touching. He decides to "wake her when we're through," probably when he gets up and gets ready to take off again.
While he's lying there, he's remembering the events leading up to the crash and how they changed him. Then he thinks of "the sun brown girl," who is the "she" in "she rides a simple wave." I imagine her as a friend of his who died, and the "wave" is how he imagines her soul drifting away. He thinks of her watching him, and knows that since she can "see the way my heart is in it now," she's still watching him and giving him her blessing.
Then he sort of flashes back in to reality, where he's still lying on the beach, and the waves are washing over him. ("Over and over and over again, the water leans towards me, it cleans my hands and head.") He feels purified of whatever happened before, and he stands up. He resents the fact that he'll probably get a bunch of sympathy when he gets back home, so he hopes that they don't "fill the hours with empty words and thoughts that fail to tell me what I've seen." They can't grasp what he had been through, so they might as well just shut up. The girl he was with stands up, and they look out at the water, and in his head, he promises his old friend that he'll "wait on" her, and that they'll meet again after he dies.
The last part of the song is about his rejection of the violence he had to live with up until that point ("Please don't bring my gun inside"), his renewed resolve, ("Heart is in it now"), and his final goodbye to the girl that died ("She rides a simple wave.").
That's my weird take on it. (Some of the lyrics in my post are different than the ones above. The ones up there aren't right.)