"It's Only Life" feels like a throwback to Wincing The Night Away to me, but from the perspective of someone whose been who's been through all that. The speaker throughout Wincing The Night Away is coming to terms with a lot of existential truths: that, in the absence of God, there are no rules, and we're on our own to decide how to live, a responsibility we cannot escape until death. He tries to share those ideas with his partner, who rejects his philosophy and him along with it, making his isolation seem all the more real.
"It's Only Life" could be directed at that speaker, or to anyone who's faced those thoughts. The first verse sets it up, when he says "you've died in the world" -- not a literal death, but maturity; the point of rejecting a youthful naivete. The object would like to return to a simple, carefree life, but he can't ignore that everything will eventually fall apart, "time will wash every tower to the sea". "Who would be born must first destroy a world," but first we must reject the world, a process which often manifests as nihilism, when we destroy what we mistook for meaning, before we've replaced it with our own.
If you're skeptical of this interpretation, I don't blame you: it's odd, and usually inaccurate, to read so much philosophy into song lyrics, but it's hard to deny Mercer's familiarity with these concepts, considering lines like "Some uberman I'd make, I'm barely a vapor", from "A Comet Appears", which references both Nietzsche's concept of the superman and possibly Sartre's recurring use of lightness as a lack of responsibility (Orestes complains of feeling too light and is grounded by murdering his mother's husband). In context, "you used to be such a lion" could be a reference to another one of Nietzsche's concepts: in his three metamorphoses, the Lion overcomes "thou shalt" to leave room for his own code of laws, but the Lion does not exist as a whole: he can only destroy.
So the object is trapped between the Lion and the Child, the Sacred Yes that builds new meaning. He's torn down everything he believed, and he doesn't know how to rebuild his world. In the chorus, the speaker sympathizes, "I've been down the very road you're walking now", and he wants the person to know that it's still okay to seek help from outside. Even if the speaker cannot tell this person what to believe, he can at least provide support and guidance.
"It's Only Life" feels like a throwback to Wincing The Night Away to me, but from the perspective of someone whose been who's been through all that. The speaker throughout Wincing The Night Away is coming to terms with a lot of existential truths: that, in the absence of God, there are no rules, and we're on our own to decide how to live, a responsibility we cannot escape until death. He tries to share those ideas with his partner, who rejects his philosophy and him along with it, making his isolation seem all the more real.
"It's Only Life" could be directed at that speaker, or to anyone who's faced those thoughts. The first verse sets it up, when he says "you've died in the world" -- not a literal death, but maturity; the point of rejecting a youthful naivete. The object would like to return to a simple, carefree life, but he can't ignore that everything will eventually fall apart, "time will wash every tower to the sea". "Who would be born must first destroy a world," but first we must reject the world, a process which often manifests as nihilism, when we destroy what we mistook for meaning, before we've replaced it with our own.
If you're skeptical of this interpretation, I don't blame you: it's odd, and usually inaccurate, to read so much philosophy into song lyrics, but it's hard to deny Mercer's familiarity with these concepts, considering lines like "Some uberman I'd make, I'm barely a vapor", from "A Comet Appears", which references both Nietzsche's concept of the superman and possibly Sartre's recurring use of lightness as a lack of responsibility (Orestes complains of feeling too light and is grounded by murdering his mother's husband). In context, "you used to be such a lion" could be a reference to another one of Nietzsche's concepts: in his three metamorphoses, the Lion overcomes "thou shalt" to leave room for his own code of laws, but the Lion does not exist as a whole: he can only destroy.
So the object is trapped between the Lion and the Child, the Sacred Yes that builds new meaning. He's torn down everything he believed, and he doesn't know how to rebuild his world. In the chorus, the speaker sympathizes, "I've been down the very road you're walking now", and he wants the person to know that it's still okay to seek help from outside. Even if the speaker cannot tell this person what to believe, he can at least provide support and guidance.
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I second yoplatz.
I second yoplatz.
This is the best song interpretation I've ever read.
This is the best song interpretation I've ever read.
id third it you hit it dead on the head
id third it you hit it dead on the head