From my understanding of this song, it's describing the death of Jean-Paul Marat (also on the album cover). It's probably using his death as a metaphor, but I'm not going to get in to that because it's mostly all subjective. Here's a line-by-line interpretation of how I see it relating to JPM:
/ / Sleeping in and out of an ice bath
/ / No warmth, no life without
JPM had a deliberating skin condition for the three years leading up to his assassination. He spent the majority of this time in an ice bath as it was the only thing that would soothe his condition.
/ / It's too much. My arms, my legs are wood
/ / unconscious trees with roots deep in the ground
Once again describing the skin condition and how, being confined to the tub, his diseased limbs "rooted" him to where he was.
/ / We will all be out, soon, an ocean ringed with tile.
/ / I know that's not your style but it certainly will be mine if I can't make this right.
/ / So please, please, please, release me.
Ocean ringed with tile = obviously bathtub. The other lines could have a lot of different meanings so I'm not going to attempt it.
/ / Can you hear my faintest breath, is it amplified?
/ / The number that I've become will put you inside.
At this point in the song the assassination has already taken place and Marat is dying. The amplification of his final words ("Help me, my dear friend!") could either refer to the reverberating effect of screaming in a bathroom, or rather something that would be amplified through history (they're pretty famous last words).
"The number that I've become will put you inside" could refer to his assassin's quote "I killed one man to save 100,000." The rest of the song is pretty self-explanatory; it's describing how it must have felt to bleed to death in a friends arms on your bathroom floor, something I think we can all relate to.
From my understanding of this song, it's describing the death of Jean-Paul Marat (also on the album cover). It's probably using his death as a metaphor, but I'm not going to get in to that because it's mostly all subjective. Here's a line-by-line interpretation of how I see it relating to JPM:
/ / Sleeping in and out of an ice bath / / No warmth, no life without
JPM had a deliberating skin condition for the three years leading up to his assassination. He spent the majority of this time in an ice bath as it was the only thing that would soothe his condition.
/ / It's too much. My arms, my legs are wood / / unconscious trees with roots deep in the ground
Once again describing the skin condition and how, being confined to the tub, his diseased limbs "rooted" him to where he was.
/ / We will all be out, soon, an ocean ringed with tile. / / I know that's not your style but it certainly will be mine if I can't make this right.
/ / So please, please, please, release me.
Ocean ringed with tile = obviously bathtub. The other lines could have a lot of different meanings so I'm not going to attempt it.
/ / Can you hear my faintest breath, is it amplified? / / The number that I've become will put you inside.
At this point in the song the assassination has already taken place and Marat is dying. The amplification of his final words ("Help me, my dear friend!") could either refer to the reverberating effect of screaming in a bathroom, or rather something that would be amplified through history (they're pretty famous last words).
"The number that I've become will put you inside" could refer to his assassin's quote "I killed one man to save 100,000." The rest of the song is pretty self-explanatory; it's describing how it must have felt to bleed to death in a friends arms on your bathroom floor, something I think we can all relate to.