A beautiful meditation on the relics of human lives. A house becomes a home when people inhabit it and really live there. The house becomes something of a battery, storing both positive and negative energy; and in a poetic sense it becomes alive. When abandoned, whether by the death of the tenants or the collapse of a family/relationship that energy lingers. In a sense it haunts itself with those stored emotions, and visitors to the house feel the effect without context --leading them to speculate about the cause of abandonment and the (perhaps) ghostly energies slowly dwindling over time.
Though this song isn't pitched to be precisely supernatural, it has a 'spiritual' sense about the house being like a shell of something once alive that has died. There is a deep sadness to it. For me, it recalls a house I stumbled upon while camping in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was so comprehensively overgrown and reclaimed by the forest that no one alive remembered the place's history. My young mind --already on a track to becoming the professional writer I now am-- kept revisiting that place in memory, telling and retelling imagined stories about why it was abandoned and what happened. I've since written several short stories about old, abandoned house, but Tom Waits, with the brevity and concision of a poet/songwriter captured it in a few lines of a song. Beautiful.
A beautiful meditation on the relics of human lives. A house becomes a home when people inhabit it and really live there. The house becomes something of a battery, storing both positive and negative energy; and in a poetic sense it becomes alive. When abandoned, whether by the death of the tenants or the collapse of a family/relationship that energy lingers. In a sense it haunts itself with those stored emotions, and visitors to the house feel the effect without context --leading them to speculate about the cause of abandonment and the (perhaps) ghostly energies slowly dwindling over time.
Though this song isn't pitched to be precisely supernatural, it has a 'spiritual' sense about the house being like a shell of something once alive that has died. There is a deep sadness to it. For me, it recalls a house I stumbled upon while camping in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was so comprehensively overgrown and reclaimed by the forest that no one alive remembered the place's history. My young mind --already on a track to becoming the professional writer I now am-- kept revisiting that place in memory, telling and retelling imagined stories about why it was abandoned and what happened. I've since written several short stories about old, abandoned house, but Tom Waits, with the brevity and concision of a poet/songwriter captured it in a few lines of a song. Beautiful.