This goes above and beyond the actual lyrics --it's just my take:
I hear it as being about two otherwise straight guys who briefly had a "more than friends" relationship during their youth at a Catholic boarding school. As adults, the other guy completely denies the relationship ever happened and has completely rejected the narrator as a way of sweeping the whole thing under the rug. The narrator has also moved on with his life, but he misses the friendship and is both angry and a little contemptuous at how the other guy reacted to the whole thing.
I'm not suggesting this actually happened to James Mercer, it is just what the lyrics suggest to me --maybe because it's so rare to hear a song about the intense emotions that can still exist in a purely Platonic friendship.
This goes above and beyond the actual lyrics --it's just my take:
I hear it as being about two otherwise straight guys who briefly had a "more than friends" relationship during their youth at a Catholic boarding school. As adults, the other guy completely denies the relationship ever happened and has completely rejected the narrator as a way of sweeping the whole thing under the rug. The narrator has also moved on with his life, but he misses the friendship and is both angry and a little contemptuous at how the other guy reacted to the whole thing.
I'm not suggesting this actually happened to James Mercer, it is just what the lyrics suggest to me --maybe because it's so rare to hear a song about the intense emotions that can still exist in a purely Platonic friendship.