When I first heard this song, I didn't look up the lyrics and just enjoyed it superficially, because I liked the sound and quiet vibe and I found it relaxing. Then on the third or fourth time, some words caught my interest while I was actually paying attention to them. I looked up the lyrics, and my entire relationship with the song shifted.
I hadn't even realized the reference that the title was making until I read the lyrics and realized they were about someone terminally ill (presumably with cancer), and the person who has to be besides them through it all, watching them. Only then did I realize that "Kettering" was referring to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Center, a cancer center in New York where I spent every weekend of this past summer while my fifteen-year old cousin did her chemotherapy.
After that, I went out for a night walk and just played the song on repeat and let myself cry to it. It's so beautiful, in the heartbreaking and plaintive way that it is, and it speaks with the humanity of pain, the simplicity of suffering. I've listened to the whole album since then and I know it's created on a foundation of metaphors, interpretations and fluctuating depictions that each song somehow plays into. But even though ever other song in 'Hospice' is just as brilliant, 'Kettering' has become something entirely different to me than just a song. Because my cousin is a hurricane thundercloud girl, and so were all the other children and young adults I got to meet frequently in her ward. So thank you, to The Antlers, for writing this piece.
When I first heard this song, I didn't look up the lyrics and just enjoyed it superficially, because I liked the sound and quiet vibe and I found it relaxing. Then on the third or fourth time, some words caught my interest while I was actually paying attention to them. I looked up the lyrics, and my entire relationship with the song shifted.
I hadn't even realized the reference that the title was making until I read the lyrics and realized they were about someone terminally ill (presumably with cancer), and the person who has to be besides them through it all, watching them. Only then did I realize that "Kettering" was referring to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Center, a cancer center in New York where I spent every weekend of this past summer while my fifteen-year old cousin did her chemotherapy.
After that, I went out for a night walk and just played the song on repeat and let myself cry to it. It's so beautiful, in the heartbreaking and plaintive way that it is, and it speaks with the humanity of pain, the simplicity of suffering. I've listened to the whole album since then and I know it's created on a foundation of metaphors, interpretations and fluctuating depictions that each song somehow plays into. But even though ever other song in 'Hospice' is just as brilliant, 'Kettering' has become something entirely different to me than just a song. Because my cousin is a hurricane thundercloud girl, and so were all the other children and young adults I got to meet frequently in her ward. So thank you, to The Antlers, for writing this piece.