This was originally a comment to one of the posts above, but I figured I'd post it here as well since you have to expand comments and it's easy to not notice.
At the start of the song he seems to be singing about resigning to his loneliness, and not bluffing to friends about how he has a new plan to escape from the home he built. To me he's singing about himself in third person throughout the song, like when he says "We built that house of his"- the 'we' being his mind and body. They built that house of loneliness, why move somewhere else and rebuild the house there? This is a song about a man who has lost faith in everything.
With that in mind, heaven would seem to be an ideal which has came and gone before but this time if it comes back he's hoping it fails before it even arrives because he's lost faith (in the sense of confidence/trust in things and people). Heaven is a dangerous ideal because it provides a person with a temporary sense that things will be alright when deep down he feels that they wont be.
Like you mentioned, the night would be depression/darkness, and at least it knows "when it's time to get going." The night has always had that ghost who almost tells him that he's still the same person he always was- despite the fact that the woman thinks that he's changed and she hates him for it. I really relate to the line "Honey there was so much more- I just didn't get busted." Toward the end of our relationship my most recent ex said "I don't know why you're so damn sad all of the time." All I was doing was listening to music ("Whiskey in my Whiskey" by the Felice Brothers) but it was enough to affect her mindstate/feelings, I've been this same person ever since I was a small child- just because she didn't hear my music doesn't mean my feelings were different.
The refrain of "Try and try and try" could be the most simple, but complex part of the song, my interpretation is that he's longing for the simple sorrows of yesterday- something that I think back to often as I didn't have any lasting sense of happiness as a child.
I see how many of the other posters could interpret the song as being about a failed relationship because it is in a sense- a relationship he had with himself and his inability to overcome his own sadness and the consequence this had for future relationships.
This song offers an interesting contrast to The Raven by Edgar A Poe:
The narrator of this story has already built a house of sorrow and filled it to the brim with thoughts. The Raven would seem to be a more humanized version of the ideal of Heaven, it was similar in that it was also suggested that it would leave him as "Other friends have flown before— On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before." In the Raven, the narrator began to cause himself to suffer by asking questions of the Raven when he knew the answer would be the same repetition. He went from curiosity, to anger, to resignation, which is the state that Jason, or the narrator of Simple Man would seem to be in.
Of course the wife died in The Raven while the girlfriend left him because she was seemingly unable to deal with his sadness so this would explain the much more intimate experience of Poe's tale and the torment of the narrator's soul.
This was originally a comment to one of the posts above, but I figured I'd post it here as well since you have to expand comments and it's easy to not notice.
At the start of the song he seems to be singing about resigning to his loneliness, and not bluffing to friends about how he has a new plan to escape from the home he built. To me he's singing about himself in third person throughout the song, like when he says "We built that house of his"- the 'we' being his mind and body. They built that house of loneliness, why move somewhere else and rebuild the house there? This is a song about a man who has lost faith in everything.
With that in mind, heaven would seem to be an ideal which has came and gone before but this time if it comes back he's hoping it fails before it even arrives because he's lost faith (in the sense of confidence/trust in things and people). Heaven is a dangerous ideal because it provides a person with a temporary sense that things will be alright when deep down he feels that they wont be.
Like you mentioned, the night would be depression/darkness, and at least it knows "when it's time to get going." The night has always had that ghost who almost tells him that he's still the same person he always was- despite the fact that the woman thinks that he's changed and she hates him for it. I really relate to the line "Honey there was so much more- I just didn't get busted." Toward the end of our relationship my most recent ex said "I don't know why you're so damn sad all of the time." All I was doing was listening to music ("Whiskey in my Whiskey" by the Felice Brothers) but it was enough to affect her mindstate/feelings, I've been this same person ever since I was a small child- just because she didn't hear my music doesn't mean my feelings were different.
The refrain of "Try and try and try" could be the most simple, but complex part of the song, my interpretation is that he's longing for the simple sorrows of yesterday- something that I think back to often as I didn't have any lasting sense of happiness as a child.
I see how many of the other posters could interpret the song as being about a failed relationship because it is in a sense- a relationship he had with himself and his inability to overcome his own sadness and the consequence this had for future relationships.
This song offers an interesting contrast to The Raven by Edgar A Poe: The narrator of this story has already built a house of sorrow and filled it to the brim with thoughts. The Raven would seem to be a more humanized version of the ideal of Heaven, it was similar in that it was also suggested that it would leave him as "Other friends have flown before— On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before." In the Raven, the narrator began to cause himself to suffer by asking questions of the Raven when he knew the answer would be the same repetition. He went from curiosity, to anger, to resignation, which is the state that Jason, or the narrator of Simple Man would seem to be in.
Of course the wife died in The Raven while the girlfriend left him because she was seemingly unable to deal with his sadness so this would explain the much more intimate experience of Poe's tale and the torment of the narrator's soul.