I don't suppose anyone has considered it's a play on words?
Sheol being the underworld (More or less), and shoal being hazardous to ships.
It could be both. He's using the ship metaphor because it sounds like shoal, but for those who look deeper, especially given the "hellish" before it, the shoal itself is a metaphor of sorts, and a near homophone, of Sheol, the place people go when they die.
Listening to this song, I imagined that the person the song is about is dead, and the pain was so great it lead the person singing the song to attempt suicide. Blood left to pool on foreign ground (And to an extent the later part about Van Gogh lying face down dead), he slit his wrists trying to escape a world that feels alien to him without the person he lost. "You're the limb I lost but somehow I still feel" is pretty self explanatory. Going to feel his legs is wanting to see or talk to the deceased, but then he remembers they're dead. They don't feel gone, but then he snaps back to reality and realizes they really are.
"Until I awake" is that he's in a coma after the attempted suicide, and maybe he's having some sort of fantastical dream about the dead person, realizing maybe they're happier wherever they are now and maybe they really are still looking down on him guiding him through life, and suddenly he doesn't want to die anymore, so he sees the one he lost guiding him around the "hellish shoal/Sheol" because they want him to live his life because he has so much left to give, hence the Van Gogh line. He's sad that he lost this person he was so close to ("I'm a little depressed"), but in this comatose state after attempting suicide ("I'm missing you to death") he realizes that life still goes on, that person isn't really gone, and though he'll miss them, he has this new found appreciation for life ("I'm happy to admit")
The "I hope you're as decorated as the day that you left" could definitely mean it's a decorated war hero that died, but it could also be interpreted as simply how dressed up and peaceful people look at wakes, all the make up, and flowers all around them, that type of thing.
That's what I got out of the song, anyway...I actually thought this all up in ~20 minutes, though, so it's bound to be flawed.
I don't suppose anyone has considered it's a play on words?
Sheol being the underworld (More or less), and shoal being hazardous to ships.
It could be both. He's using the ship metaphor because it sounds like shoal, but for those who look deeper, especially given the "hellish" before it, the shoal itself is a metaphor of sorts, and a near homophone, of Sheol, the place people go when they die.
Listening to this song, I imagined that the person the song is about is dead, and the pain was so great it lead the person singing the song to attempt suicide. Blood left to pool on foreign ground (And to an extent the later part about Van Gogh lying face down dead), he slit his wrists trying to escape a world that feels alien to him without the person he lost. "You're the limb I lost but somehow I still feel" is pretty self explanatory. Going to feel his legs is wanting to see or talk to the deceased, but then he remembers they're dead. They don't feel gone, but then he snaps back to reality and realizes they really are.
"Until I awake" is that he's in a coma after the attempted suicide, and maybe he's having some sort of fantastical dream about the dead person, realizing maybe they're happier wherever they are now and maybe they really are still looking down on him guiding him through life, and suddenly he doesn't want to die anymore, so he sees the one he lost guiding him around the "hellish shoal/Sheol" because they want him to live his life because he has so much left to give, hence the Van Gogh line. He's sad that he lost this person he was so close to ("I'm a little depressed"), but in this comatose state after attempting suicide ("I'm missing you to death") he realizes that life still goes on, that person isn't really gone, and though he'll miss them, he has this new found appreciation for life ("I'm happy to admit")
The "I hope you're as decorated as the day that you left" could definitely mean it's a decorated war hero that died, but it could also be interpreted as simply how dressed up and peaceful people look at wakes, all the make up, and flowers all around them, that type of thing.
That's what I got out of the song, anyway...I actually thought this all up in ~20 minutes, though, so it's bound to be flawed.