It's pretty clear if you listen to the lyrics on some of the other songs that he places a fair amount of blame on himself. I think this is the big realisation that the realtionship is doomed; in a moment of reflection (har, har) Damian realises that he's been detached in order to protect his own feelings, but that detachment was killing the relationship.
The coda is where I kind of fall off this metaphor... but coming from Australia, where we just suffered a decades-long drought, I think it might be this: we're praying for the relationship to fix itself, that tomorrow we'll wake up and everything will be okay. We're praying that tomorrow it rains and the crops will grow and we won't have to sell the farm. But when it finally came: we didn't even notice. We just continued praying that everything would be fine, as the real saviour came and went.
It's pretty condemning of the narrator. Of both of them, I guess. It seems like he thought it would have been really easy to salvage the relationship if he'd only noticed it was under threat.
If you listen to Ira Glass interviewing the band on the "Extra-Nice edition", you'll learn that much of this album is about Damian's failing marriage and divorce (he writes all the lyrics). In fact the whole record is almost a concept album about the end of his relationship with his wife. And this being the finalé of the record, it's not hard to see that this might be the finalé to the relationship.
It's pretty clear if you listen to the lyrics on some of the other songs that he places a fair amount of blame on himself. I think this is the big realisation that the realtionship is doomed; in a moment of reflection (har, har) Damian realises that he's been detached in order to protect his own feelings, but that detachment was killing the relationship.
The coda is where I kind of fall off this metaphor... but coming from Australia, where we just suffered a decades-long drought, I think it might be this: we're praying for the relationship to fix itself, that tomorrow we'll wake up and everything will be okay. We're praying that tomorrow it rains and the crops will grow and we won't have to sell the farm. But when it finally came: we didn't even notice. We just continued praying that everything would be fine, as the real saviour came and went.
It's pretty condemning of the narrator. Of both of them, I guess. It seems like he thought it would have been really easy to salvage the relationship if he'd only noticed it was under threat.