The word "sentimental" is in the opening line, and that's a good word for this whole song.
It starts off obliquely, the way a person with an embarrassing condition might approach a doctor: "If I had... a friend... who has a rash..."
Similarly, this story starts: "There's a sentimental story/ Of two people that I know..."
It's not really a spoiler, even, to reveal the ending: "I'm the boy-- the girl is you."
Still, the speaker approaches her with this sideways shpiel, telling her about this hypothetical couple who "always loved each other so." In fact, "The people in the story/ Lived a storybook romance."
Well, as the Yiddish saying goes-- if it doesn't get better, it gets worse. Either he is working his way up to a proposal, with something like, "Would you like to live happily ever after with me?
Or... um...
"Then they had a lovers' quarrel/ No, I don't recall the reason why.../ And the boy said, 'Goodbye.'"
He was so mad he broke up with her, and now he doesn't even know what he was mad about. Oops.
But wait, if he broke it off, why is he talking to her now? "Now, he's begging for forgiveness/ And a chance to start anew."
It is an interesting approach:. "Imagine, hypothetically, two people in love, and, in theory, the boy stormed off for no real good reason. If he said he was really really really sorry, hypothetically, she'd have to take him back, right?"
He'd better have a better strategy than this. Let's hope he showed up not just with a "sentimental" song but flowers or chocolates or concert tickets (all they have done so far is "go to movies" and out to "dance").
The good news, he is admitting fault, he is coming forward, and he is not blaming any of it on her. Guys like that don't fall out of the sky. She should tell him they can start a new chapter (oh, great. Now I'm doing it).
Next Song: That Forever Kind of Love
Showing posts with label break-up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label break-up. Show all posts
Monday, August 18, 2014
Monday, August 11, 2014
Hiding in the Chapel
The songs starts with a city-wide search for the speaker: "All over town, the question is going 'round/ 'Where, oh where, can he be?'"
The reference to the old song "Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" leads us to understand that they are searching for him out of concern, and that this is not, say, a manhunt for a criminal.
However, he is not hoping for rescue, either. He is, in fact, just looking for a place to be alone to mope. "I'm hiding in the chapel... You ask me why I sit here and cry... Oh, Lord above/ The only girl I love/ Has gone."
Even though he is not a criminal, he is using the chapel as a sanctuary of a similar sort. Mostly, he is hiding from the concerns, blandishments, and cheering-up of others. He is sad, and wants to be sad. And, just as a wounded animal does, he found a safe den in which to lick his wounds, so to speak.
In a way, he is also signaling those who search for him that he is in severe emotional pain. If he were mostly fine, he would seek their solace and allow himself to be comforted.
Also, he is hiding, he says, "from a broken heart." Something about the chapel allows him to feel distracted.
The next line is somewhat melodramatic: "Here I'll stay, until I hear her say/ That she wants me back again." This is passive-aggressive, but also typical behavior for a wounded person. Probably, he will stay until he gets hungry enough to leave.
Up to this point, he has imagined that his lost love has done one of three things-- moved on, mourned the loss of their relationship, or joined the search for him in order to take him back.
Then he realizes, or has somehow heard (unlikely, as who could tell him?), a fourth possibility: "If it's true that she is hiding, too..."
She might be pulling the same stunt he is! In that case, "I'll search for her." Well, he has put himself in a Catch-22. He is willing to seek her out of she is hiding, but cannot know if this is the case since he is hiding!
It would be easy to deduce that the speaker is disturbed. More likely, he is freshly hurt and simply seeking a place to be alone with his thoughts-- and the Lord. His behavior in this sense, is rational in its irrationality. Of course he's not making sense; his world has just been upended!
There is an assumption that someone sad needs to be cheered up. But sometimes, it's important to just be sad, to have the feeling fully, and let it subside on its own. Attempts to suppress it will only cause it to fester and build up pressure until there is an outburst.
Our speaker is in mourning, a legitimate and perfectly healthy reaction to heartbreak. He will get better, and sort his conflicted feelings out. At least he knows that he needs privacy and solitude in order to do so, and has the wisdom to seek out a place where no one will look for him, so he can recover in peace.
NOTE: This next series of songs is not available, as far as I can discern, online. They are on parts 2 and 3 of a series of 3 CDs collectively titled "Paul Simon aka Jerry Landis: Work in Progress." The subtitle most likely refers not only to the songs but to Simon, as they predate his Simon and Garfunkel output, and so present--to borrow a phrase-- a portrait of the songwriter as a young man. It is an excellent series, with very good biographical and discography (discographical?) information.
Next Song: The People in the Story
The reference to the old song "Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" leads us to understand that they are searching for him out of concern, and that this is not, say, a manhunt for a criminal.
However, he is not hoping for rescue, either. He is, in fact, just looking for a place to be alone to mope. "I'm hiding in the chapel... You ask me why I sit here and cry... Oh, Lord above/ The only girl I love/ Has gone."
Even though he is not a criminal, he is using the chapel as a sanctuary of a similar sort. Mostly, he is hiding from the concerns, blandishments, and cheering-up of others. He is sad, and wants to be sad. And, just as a wounded animal does, he found a safe den in which to lick his wounds, so to speak.
In a way, he is also signaling those who search for him that he is in severe emotional pain. If he were mostly fine, he would seek their solace and allow himself to be comforted.
Also, he is hiding, he says, "from a broken heart." Something about the chapel allows him to feel distracted.
The next line is somewhat melodramatic: "Here I'll stay, until I hear her say/ That she wants me back again." This is passive-aggressive, but also typical behavior for a wounded person. Probably, he will stay until he gets hungry enough to leave.
Up to this point, he has imagined that his lost love has done one of three things-- moved on, mourned the loss of their relationship, or joined the search for him in order to take him back.
Then he realizes, or has somehow heard (unlikely, as who could tell him?), a fourth possibility: "If it's true that she is hiding, too..."
She might be pulling the same stunt he is! In that case, "I'll search for her." Well, he has put himself in a Catch-22. He is willing to seek her out of she is hiding, but cannot know if this is the case since he is hiding!
It would be easy to deduce that the speaker is disturbed. More likely, he is freshly hurt and simply seeking a place to be alone with his thoughts-- and the Lord. His behavior in this sense, is rational in its irrationality. Of course he's not making sense; his world has just been upended!
There is an assumption that someone sad needs to be cheered up. But sometimes, it's important to just be sad, to have the feeling fully, and let it subside on its own. Attempts to suppress it will only cause it to fester and build up pressure until there is an outburst.
Our speaker is in mourning, a legitimate and perfectly healthy reaction to heartbreak. He will get better, and sort his conflicted feelings out. At least he knows that he needs privacy and solitude in order to do so, and has the wisdom to seek out a place where no one will look for him, so he can recover in peace.
NOTE: This next series of songs is not available, as far as I can discern, online. They are on parts 2 and 3 of a series of 3 CDs collectively titled "Paul Simon aka Jerry Landis: Work in Progress." The subtitle most likely refers not only to the songs but to Simon, as they predate his Simon and Garfunkel output, and so present--to borrow a phrase-- a portrait of the songwriter as a young man. It is an excellent series, with very good biographical and discography (discographical?) information.
Next Song: The People in the Story
Monday, June 9, 2014
Haven't You Hurt Me Enough?
[Note: according to liner notes in a CD I came into possession of after having posted this, the writer is "unknown."]
I admit I expected less from this song. It seemed like it might be another whiny "woe-is-me" number about a man suffering at the "cruelty" of a woman who doesn't love him back. And now, she's-- what, seeing guys she does like? And he's taking it personally...
Nope. This song is about a man suffering the at the cruelty of a woman who is actually being actively cruel.
At least he has not internalized her meanness and blamed himself. He even tries to analyze her behavior.
It starts with her breaking it off, and breaking his heart. Still, he is willing to move on and "forget." All healthy behavior on his part-- you mourn, then you move on.
But she is not content to leave it at that. She actively torments him: "Last night just for a joke/ You called to say hello... You call just to tease me/ And tell me about the other guys you see."
As former US First Lady Nancy Reagan said, there is a name for people like this, and it rhymes with "witch." There is really something wrong with someone who adds insult to injury, rubs salt in wounds they have inflicted... and keeps kicking the person they have already, as we used to say, kicked to the curb.
She knows this hurts him-- "You knew that every word was breaking my poor heart"-- and he starts to realize that this is her motivation: "Does it make you feel good to know that I'm feeling blue?"
The German word for this is "schadenfreude," happiness at someone else's pain. In this case, it's coupled with sadism, happiness from inflicting that pain.
Through his tears, our sensitive man keeps working on understanding her logic, warped as it is: "I know you don't love me/ Why do you want me to keep loving you?"
Then it dawns on him that the answer is in the question: "Your pride's too strong to let me go." By continuing to torment him, she continues to revel in her strength, and her power over him.
He tries to appeal to her compassion, although he already knows she has none: "It's all a game to you/
But I'm the one who cries." And so the song ends as it began, with our victim still in tears.
Verbal and emotional abuse, stalking, and other such bullying has since migrated from the telephone to the worldwide party line that is the Internet.
And men do suffer such abuse, even physical abuse, at the hands of women. A recent video showed two actors demonstrating this by arguing in a London park (search on YouTube for the channel "POZAPAPO"). First, the man shoves the woman. Instantly, women accost him and protected her. In the second scenario, she shoves him into the same fence. Women watched... and some even laughed. (The men in the park avoided involvement in both cases.)
Then the video ends with this statistic: "40% of domestic violence is suffered by men."
Far from being a whiny song about a man who imagines that a woman's disinterest is a personal slight, this is actually a very brave song about the difficulties of dealing with abuse. How do you defend yourself without coming across as the bully? How do you stop someone from calling night after night? What do you do with people who never hurt you "enough"?
Decades after this song was written, society continues to struggle with these issues.
Next Song: Funny Little Girl
I admit I expected less from this song. It seemed like it might be another whiny "woe-is-me" number about a man suffering at the "cruelty" of a woman who doesn't love him back. And now, she's-- what, seeing guys she does like? And he's taking it personally...
Nope. This song is about a man suffering the at the cruelty of a woman who is actually being actively cruel.
At least he has not internalized her meanness and blamed himself. He even tries to analyze her behavior.
It starts with her breaking it off, and breaking his heart. Still, he is willing to move on and "forget." All healthy behavior on his part-- you mourn, then you move on.
But she is not content to leave it at that. She actively torments him: "Last night just for a joke/ You called to say hello... You call just to tease me/ And tell me about the other guys you see."
As former US First Lady Nancy Reagan said, there is a name for people like this, and it rhymes with "witch." There is really something wrong with someone who adds insult to injury, rubs salt in wounds they have inflicted... and keeps kicking the person they have already, as we used to say, kicked to the curb.
She knows this hurts him-- "You knew that every word was breaking my poor heart"-- and he starts to realize that this is her motivation: "Does it make you feel good to know that I'm feeling blue?"
The German word for this is "schadenfreude," happiness at someone else's pain. In this case, it's coupled with sadism, happiness from inflicting that pain.
Through his tears, our sensitive man keeps working on understanding her logic, warped as it is: "I know you don't love me/ Why do you want me to keep loving you?"
Then it dawns on him that the answer is in the question: "Your pride's too strong to let me go." By continuing to torment him, she continues to revel in her strength, and her power over him.
He tries to appeal to her compassion, although he already knows she has none: "It's all a game to you/
But I'm the one who cries." And so the song ends as it began, with our victim still in tears.
Verbal and emotional abuse, stalking, and other such bullying has since migrated from the telephone to the worldwide party line that is the Internet.
And men do suffer such abuse, even physical abuse, at the hands of women. A recent video showed two actors demonstrating this by arguing in a London park (search on YouTube for the channel "POZAPAPO"). First, the man shoves the woman. Instantly, women accost him and protected her. In the second scenario, she shoves him into the same fence. Women watched... and some even laughed. (The men in the park avoided involvement in both cases.)
Then the video ends with this statistic: "40% of domestic violence is suffered by men."
Far from being a whiny song about a man who imagines that a woman's disinterest is a personal slight, this is actually a very brave song about the difficulties of dealing with abuse. How do you defend yourself without coming across as the bully? How do you stop someone from calling night after night? What do you do with people who never hurt you "enough"?
Decades after this song was written, society continues to struggle with these issues.
Next Song: Funny Little Girl
Monday, March 10, 2014
Loneliness
Among the hundreds of words Shakespeare is credited with coining, one of the most popular must be "lonely." In fact, it can be shown by a catalog of his lyrics that Sting would not have had a songwriting career without this word. Simon himself has many titles that use the word in some form, and both songwriters-- now on tour together-- have explored the idea in great depth and breadth.
This is actually quite an affecting little song. It's melancholy without lapsing into lugubriousness.The lyrics are pitched a bit above the average teeny-bop reading level, making it poetic without being academically so.
This time, we have a speaker lying in bed thinking about his lost love: "Loneliness/ You're gone and I must confess/ My nights are spent in misery/ Only my sorrow lingers with me."
In the next verse, Simon uses imagery that Smokey Robinson later would in songs like "Tracks of My Tears" and "Tears of a Clown," of the person who is only smiling on the outside: "Although I laugh, it's just a pose/ Inside I cry, but nobody knows."
He explains that he is "playing a part," but he "can't deceive [his] heart," let alone laugh his way out of his doldrums.
Then he poses a paradox: "There's no one to share my loneliness," he says. Yes, but if someone were there, wouldn't that mean he would not be lonely in the first place? This is similar to the idea Stevie Nicks poses, in "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?" with her lyric: "I'd rather be alone/ Than be without you."
It gets to the root of why Shakespeare needed the word to begin with. "Alone" is one thing; it just mean "solitary." Some people, like Norma Desmond, even want to be alone. But if being alone is a problem for you, then you are "lonely"... even in a crowd. If "alone" is just "1," then "lonely" is "2 minus 1."
Stevie Nicks would rather be simply "alone" altogether-- with no one at all, and no emotional loss-- than be "without" the one she loves. To her, it is, despite the saying, better to have "never loved at all" than to have "loved and lost."
And Simon, here, could have a friend or brother, similarly heartbroken or longing for love, and at least have someone to "fill the emptiness" and talk about how lonely they are.
The song closes on a note of despair: "I can't forget your memory/ At night, it haunts my reverie."
Maybe things will look better in the morning? "Without your love, I can't endure." Maybe not.
This is not a song of agony, of gnashing teeth and tearing hair. It is not a song, like Sting's "Every Breath You Take," of rage and possessive revenge.
It is simply a long sigh. It's the song of the dull, continuous ache of an endless-seeming, solitary night, spent staring at the ceiling, in a bed with only one's regrets for company. While our speaker's eyes may be welled with tears, he's past weeping. Now, it just hurts.
The bass backup singers presage Simon's use of such groups as the Jesse Dixon Singers and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Meanwhile, the twangy bass-line on guitar recalls that of early Johnny Cash.
Simon's delivery is a major part of the song's success. He doesn't emote much, or even moan. He's too wrung out, emotionally, for that. He returns to this delivery in songs like "Hearts and Bones" and especially "How the Heart Approaches What it Yearns." This song is a lost, understated gem.
Next Song: Dreams Can Come True
This is actually quite an affecting little song. It's melancholy without lapsing into lugubriousness.The lyrics are pitched a bit above the average teeny-bop reading level, making it poetic without being academically so.
This time, we have a speaker lying in bed thinking about his lost love: "Loneliness/ You're gone and I must confess/ My nights are spent in misery/ Only my sorrow lingers with me."
In the next verse, Simon uses imagery that Smokey Robinson later would in songs like "Tracks of My Tears" and "Tears of a Clown," of the person who is only smiling on the outside: "Although I laugh, it's just a pose/ Inside I cry, but nobody knows."
He explains that he is "playing a part," but he "can't deceive [his] heart," let alone laugh his way out of his doldrums.
Then he poses a paradox: "There's no one to share my loneliness," he says. Yes, but if someone were there, wouldn't that mean he would not be lonely in the first place? This is similar to the idea Stevie Nicks poses, in "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?" with her lyric: "I'd rather be alone/ Than be without you."
It gets to the root of why Shakespeare needed the word to begin with. "Alone" is one thing; it just mean "solitary." Some people, like Norma Desmond, even want to be alone. But if being alone is a problem for you, then you are "lonely"... even in a crowd. If "alone" is just "1," then "lonely" is "2 minus 1."
Stevie Nicks would rather be simply "alone" altogether-- with no one at all, and no emotional loss-- than be "without" the one she loves. To her, it is, despite the saying, better to have "never loved at all" than to have "loved and lost."
And Simon, here, could have a friend or brother, similarly heartbroken or longing for love, and at least have someone to "fill the emptiness" and talk about how lonely they are.
The song closes on a note of despair: "I can't forget your memory/ At night, it haunts my reverie."
Maybe things will look better in the morning? "Without your love, I can't endure." Maybe not.
This is not a song of agony, of gnashing teeth and tearing hair. It is not a song, like Sting's "Every Breath You Take," of rage and possessive revenge.
It is simply a long sigh. It's the song of the dull, continuous ache of an endless-seeming, solitary night, spent staring at the ceiling, in a bed with only one's regrets for company. While our speaker's eyes may be welled with tears, he's past weeping. Now, it just hurts.
The bass backup singers presage Simon's use of such groups as the Jesse Dixon Singers and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Meanwhile, the twangy bass-line on guitar recalls that of early Johnny Cash.
Simon's delivery is a major part of the song's success. He doesn't emote much, or even moan. He's too wrung out, emotionally, for that. He returns to this delivery in songs like "Hearts and Bones" and especially "How the Heart Approaches What it Yearns." This song is a lost, understated gem.
Next Song: Dreams Can Come True
Monday, January 27, 2014
Forever and After
This tender break-up song represents a leap forward in Simon's writing capability. It presages the folk-guitar songwriting that defines, for many, the Simon and Garfunkel sound.
The opening verse is in the traditional a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. It also contains what is called a "concrete" image. Rather than some vague musing about missing a sweetheart and some poetry about dove or rainbow, it gives the listener a real-life, daily-life "metal picture" to symbolize the passage of lonely time: "How long am I going to miss you?/ How many cigarettes will I have to burn?"
(Think of later concrete images of Simon's: "She crept to my tent with her flashlight" from "Duncan," "Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike," from "America" " and "Laying out my winter clothes" from "The Boxer.")
The first half of this song, in fact, is a series of questions, a technique used in every song from "Close to You" by The Carpenters to Dylan's signature "Blowin' in the Wind." The speaker here continues, "When can I make my lonely heart realize/ That you will never return?"
Then we have a couplet that seems to imply that it will be the refrain: "How long will I hear your warm laughter?/ I'm afraid-- forever and after." This is a nice gloss on the overused "forever and ever" or "forever and a day."
Since the title of the song is "Forever and After," we presume that we will next have another quatrain, again followed by this couplet.
We're wrong. We have another two lines; still, we think these might be the second half of the chorus, especially since they continue the question motif: "How many times do I hurry home to you/ To find you gone, to find you gone?"
This repetition of a phrase is very reminiscent of the folk songwriting style. Think of "We Shall Overcome," "Kumbaya" or "This Little Light of Mine" ("Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine").
Then, we have two more verses, but each has six lines, with the third and sixth rhyming. The first of these is "Each time I held you near me/ I hear you say you love me/ More than the day before/ You'd smile when you would see me/ Take your kisses to me / And go on wanting more." [The emphasis on the rhyme is mine.]
In this verse, we hear the speaker rehashing the relationship, as in many break-up songs, missing both his sweetheart and the feeling of being in love. We hear him think on the good times, as we expect.
Next, we assume he will wonder "what went wrong." Did he make a mistake? Did she? Was there someone else? Did they simply outgrow each other... or get pulled apart by fate?
But all we get is: "Though things sometimes went wrong/ It never, never lasted for long/ It wasn't worth the care." In this case, that expression means means "it wasn't worth the bother, the trouble." When there were fights, they were brief and unimportant. So as far as he is concerned, the reason for the break-up remains elusive.
There seems to be a grammatical disagreement between the plural "things" and the singular "it." But consider the "correct" alternative: "Though things sometimes went wrong/ They never lasted for long." That's just not how people talk. "It," we know, refers to the particular disagreement, whatever it was about, not the "things" that went wrong.
The song ends with the reason the fights were short: "For then we had each other's love/ We had so much, so much to share, so much to share." There's that internal repetition again.
There is only sadness here. No anger, no finger-pointing or name-calling. Just a wonderful, tender love that... ended. Perhaps if the speaker knew why she left, he could get what we today call "closure," and find a lesson to carry forward into his next relationship: "Well, I won't do that again" or "I won't fall for someone who does that again."
But we all know that, sometimes, there is no answer, no closure. And when that happens, we can find ourselves wondering, "If it was so great, why did it have to end?" We reminisce, question, smoke another cigarette, and wonder... forever and after.
By altering his verses' shape in mid-song, and presenting a potential chorus and then not actually repeating it, Simon does two things. One is to symbolize the song's theme-- expectations going unmet-- in its very structure.
The other is to begin to delineate his signature style. He begins, here, to explore the idea of altering a song's structure midstream, of fusing two songs into one. He also sings solo, to an acoustic guitar-- not a "pop music" move.
This is a Tom and Jerry song, to be sure. But it's one of the few that, had it appeared on a Simon and Garfunkel album, would have been completely at home there. Yes, it has elements of The Everly Brothers wistfulness, and the melodic folk tradition, and the new grittier folk style.
But it fuses these elements, then adds a confident intelligence and a willingness to not find answers to the questions it raises. With "Forever and After," we really stop hearing the pop star-wannabe that was Jerry Landis... and we start recognizing the mature Paul Simon we know today.
When this song was written, he could have been no more than 18. As if we weren't impressed enough already. No, Simon was not finished trying to be Elvis or Dion... or an Ink Spot, an Everly Brother or Brill Building teen idol, as we shall see (and it's possible that, in his 70s, he's still trying!).
But he was starting to come into his own, find his voice, and define himself as a songwriter. It's still the 1950s when this song is recorded. But "Forever and After," in style and substance, is a 1960s song. More importantly, it's a Paul Simon song.
Next Song: Aeroplane of Silver Steel
The opening verse is in the traditional a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. It also contains what is called a "concrete" image. Rather than some vague musing about missing a sweetheart and some poetry about dove or rainbow, it gives the listener a real-life, daily-life "metal picture" to symbolize the passage of lonely time: "How long am I going to miss you?/ How many cigarettes will I have to burn?"
(Think of later concrete images of Simon's: "She crept to my tent with her flashlight" from "Duncan," "Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike," from "America" " and "Laying out my winter clothes" from "The Boxer.")
The first half of this song, in fact, is a series of questions, a technique used in every song from "Close to You" by The Carpenters to Dylan's signature "Blowin' in the Wind." The speaker here continues, "When can I make my lonely heart realize/ That you will never return?"
Then we have a couplet that seems to imply that it will be the refrain: "How long will I hear your warm laughter?/ I'm afraid-- forever and after." This is a nice gloss on the overused "forever and ever" or "forever and a day."
Since the title of the song is "Forever and After," we presume that we will next have another quatrain, again followed by this couplet.
We're wrong. We have another two lines; still, we think these might be the second half of the chorus, especially since they continue the question motif: "How many times do I hurry home to you/ To find you gone, to find you gone?"
This repetition of a phrase is very reminiscent of the folk songwriting style. Think of "We Shall Overcome," "Kumbaya" or "This Little Light of Mine" ("Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine").
Then, we have two more verses, but each has six lines, with the third and sixth rhyming. The first of these is "Each time I held you near me/ I hear you say you love me/ More than the day before/ You'd smile when you would see me/ Take your kisses to me / And go on wanting more." [The emphasis on the rhyme is mine.]
In this verse, we hear the speaker rehashing the relationship, as in many break-up songs, missing both his sweetheart and the feeling of being in love. We hear him think on the good times, as we expect.
Next, we assume he will wonder "what went wrong." Did he make a mistake? Did she? Was there someone else? Did they simply outgrow each other... or get pulled apart by fate?
But all we get is: "Though things sometimes went wrong/ It never, never lasted for long/ It wasn't worth the care." In this case, that expression means means "it wasn't worth the bother, the trouble." When there were fights, they were brief and unimportant. So as far as he is concerned, the reason for the break-up remains elusive.
There seems to be a grammatical disagreement between the plural "things" and the singular "it." But consider the "correct" alternative: "Though things sometimes went wrong/ They never lasted for long." That's just not how people talk. "It," we know, refers to the particular disagreement, whatever it was about, not the "things" that went wrong.
The song ends with the reason the fights were short: "For then we had each other's love/ We had so much, so much to share, so much to share." There's that internal repetition again.
There is only sadness here. No anger, no finger-pointing or name-calling. Just a wonderful, tender love that... ended. Perhaps if the speaker knew why she left, he could get what we today call "closure," and find a lesson to carry forward into his next relationship: "Well, I won't do that again" or "I won't fall for someone who does that again."
But we all know that, sometimes, there is no answer, no closure. And when that happens, we can find ourselves wondering, "If it was so great, why did it have to end?" We reminisce, question, smoke another cigarette, and wonder... forever and after.
By altering his verses' shape in mid-song, and presenting a potential chorus and then not actually repeating it, Simon does two things. One is to symbolize the song's theme-- expectations going unmet-- in its very structure.
The other is to begin to delineate his signature style. He begins, here, to explore the idea of altering a song's structure midstream, of fusing two songs into one. He also sings solo, to an acoustic guitar-- not a "pop music" move.
This is a Tom and Jerry song, to be sure. But it's one of the few that, had it appeared on a Simon and Garfunkel album, would have been completely at home there. Yes, it has elements of The Everly Brothers wistfulness, and the melodic folk tradition, and the new grittier folk style.
But it fuses these elements, then adds a confident intelligence and a willingness to not find answers to the questions it raises. With "Forever and After," we really stop hearing the pop star-wannabe that was Jerry Landis... and we start recognizing the mature Paul Simon we know today.
When this song was written, he could have been no more than 18. As if we weren't impressed enough already. No, Simon was not finished trying to be Elvis or Dion... or an Ink Spot, an Everly Brother or Brill Building teen idol, as we shall see (and it's possible that, in his 70s, he's still trying!).
But he was starting to come into his own, find his voice, and define himself as a songwriter. It's still the 1950s when this song is recorded. But "Forever and After," in style and substance, is a 1960s song. More importantly, it's a Paul Simon song.
Next Song: Aeroplane of Silver Steel
Monday, March 11, 2013
Another Galaxy
This song is much like The Beatles' "She's Leaving Home." As in that song, we get both the woman's story and her parents' reaction. However, there are only two verses here, and one chorus. Also in that song, she is going toward her lover, and in this she is running from him.
But still, both songs are about women leaving stability for the promise of something more, even if it means instability.
While there are scant clues here, we can guess that the wedding was supposed to take place in Texas, since the color of the roses on her wedding cake recalls the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Also, there is a "border" so close she can drive across it in less than a day's time.
The song tells us that she feels that leaving before the wedding was the best option, the "lesser crime." Better than leaving the groom at the altar, far better than going through with the ceremony and then getting a divorce.
The word "gone" is repeated, both to imply the finality and irrevocability of her flight, and to imply the idea that she may have left not just her wedding but her senses. In short, she was stretched too tightly, and she snapped.
This is not to say that she is crazy. Having a sane reaction to an insane situation may seem crazy to all those for whom the insanity seems rational. But from her perspective, the situation was untenable, and she did what she had to do to stay sane.
Naturally, even though she feels that was she has done is for the best and will not undo it, there is still the wrenching feeling that comes with abandoning all one has known. Her dreams that night are stormy, reflecting the pain she feels, the pain she knows she has caused, and the uncertainty of tomorrow's life when she wakes.
Perhaps she associates the Mexican shoreline with "hurricane" weather, because she imagines the eye of one passing over her bed, her "pillow" an "island" targeted by the storm. Remember from the song "Hurricane Eye"-- the eye is only a temporary calm. While she is calming down from the turmoil of her leaving, the tumult of what happens tomorrow has yet to strike with its gale in turn.
The chorus explains that changes are hard, almost impossible, but so very necessary. The pain of losing everything, even if that everything is not much or even bad, keeps many people from making such changes. They stay in bad jobs or bad relationships for years or more, afraid to give up stability for potential gain. Most could give up a "no" for a "yes"... but then most such choices ask us to give up a "yes" for nothing more than a wisp of a "maybe."
And then sometimes, the present is so miserable, and the potential future that stems from it so undesirable, that this other potential future-- this thin "maybe"-- is just too alluring.
Tomorrow will bring its half of the storm, yes. But right now, in the hurricane's eye, she can see a calm sky filled with another entire "galaxy" of possibility. And if she can get through the other half of the storm, it should be clear skies after that-- containing a whole galaxy to explore as her reward.
Next Song: Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean.
But still, both songs are about women leaving stability for the promise of something more, even if it means instability.
While there are scant clues here, we can guess that the wedding was supposed to take place in Texas, since the color of the roses on her wedding cake recalls the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Also, there is a "border" so close she can drive across it in less than a day's time.
The song tells us that she feels that leaving before the wedding was the best option, the "lesser crime." Better than leaving the groom at the altar, far better than going through with the ceremony and then getting a divorce.
The word "gone" is repeated, both to imply the finality and irrevocability of her flight, and to imply the idea that she may have left not just her wedding but her senses. In short, she was stretched too tightly, and she snapped.
This is not to say that she is crazy. Having a sane reaction to an insane situation may seem crazy to all those for whom the insanity seems rational. But from her perspective, the situation was untenable, and she did what she had to do to stay sane.
Naturally, even though she feels that was she has done is for the best and will not undo it, there is still the wrenching feeling that comes with abandoning all one has known. Her dreams that night are stormy, reflecting the pain she feels, the pain she knows she has caused, and the uncertainty of tomorrow's life when she wakes.
Perhaps she associates the Mexican shoreline with "hurricane" weather, because she imagines the eye of one passing over her bed, her "pillow" an "island" targeted by the storm. Remember from the song "Hurricane Eye"-- the eye is only a temporary calm. While she is calming down from the turmoil of her leaving, the tumult of what happens tomorrow has yet to strike with its gale in turn.
The chorus explains that changes are hard, almost impossible, but so very necessary. The pain of losing everything, even if that everything is not much or even bad, keeps many people from making such changes. They stay in bad jobs or bad relationships for years or more, afraid to give up stability for potential gain. Most could give up a "no" for a "yes"... but then most such choices ask us to give up a "yes" for nothing more than a wisp of a "maybe."
And then sometimes, the present is so miserable, and the potential future that stems from it so undesirable, that this other potential future-- this thin "maybe"-- is just too alluring.
Tomorrow will bring its half of the storm, yes. But right now, in the hurricane's eye, she can see a calm sky filled with another entire "galaxy" of possibility. And if she can get through the other half of the storm, it should be clear skies after that-- containing a whole galaxy to explore as her reward.
Next Song: Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean.
Monday, November 26, 2012
You're the One
This is another of Simon's songs that seems to be two songs welded together. The first is a love song, the second is a break-up song.
But perhaps it is one song, just in two parts, like an episode of Law & Order. First, we see the explosive relationship being assembled and the fuse lit... then we see the fallout.
There are two people here-- let's call them Chris and Pat, with Chris being the speaker. Chris is an insecure person, regardless of being in a relationship or not: "Nervous when you got it/ Nervous when it's gone" that it is gone for good... and then nervous of losing it again if it comes back.
The problem starts immediately, with the first line of the song. While most lullabies have four angels guarding a sleeping child, over-protective Chris piles "twelve angles" onto Pat, saying "I'd do anything to keep you safe."
Things move slowly-- "little bit by little bit"-- until they are perfect: "Now you got it, that's it." Instantly, Chris starts to "take [the relationship's] temperature every hour," which probably drives Pat batty. Chris also is needy, telling Pat: "You are the air inside my chest."
Then there is a clatter of hand drums, symbolizing discord. Suddenly, there is a break-up! And we start Part II: The Recrimination.
"You're the one!" accuses Chris. "You broke my heart. You made me cry." Here, Simon is mocking the pop-song convention of blaming the other party.
But some part of Chris is rational, after all. When piling on angles, Chris muses: "Maybe that's a waste of angles, I don't know." This part of Chris' mind, capable of analyzing and even debating against its own thoughts, comes back into play. This part asserts itself through a subconscious "dream." Now, Chris is able to put the capacity for anticipating others' needs into use, now, to see another's point of view: "But when I hear it from the other side/ It's a completely different song/ I'm the one who made you cry/ I'm the one who's wrong." [emphasis mine].
Then Simon gives us his moral of the story. Change is constant in "nature," he says, citing the amorphous "shapeless shapes" of "clouds and waves and flame." But "human expectation," unreasonably, "is that love remains the same."
So Chris does the obvious thing: "Blame, blame, blame." Whose fault is it? Chris, for being smothering and clingy? Pat, for not proving some sort of reassurance, or for enabling Chris' neediness to persist past the breaking point?
Yes, and yes-- it's everyone's fault, Simon concludes: "We're the one."
Next Song: The Teacher
But perhaps it is one song, just in two parts, like an episode of Law & Order. First, we see the explosive relationship being assembled and the fuse lit... then we see the fallout.
There are two people here-- let's call them Chris and Pat, with Chris being the speaker. Chris is an insecure person, regardless of being in a relationship or not: "Nervous when you got it/ Nervous when it's gone" that it is gone for good... and then nervous of losing it again if it comes back.
The problem starts immediately, with the first line of the song. While most lullabies have four angels guarding a sleeping child, over-protective Chris piles "twelve angles" onto Pat, saying "I'd do anything to keep you safe."
Things move slowly-- "little bit by little bit"-- until they are perfect: "Now you got it, that's it." Instantly, Chris starts to "take [the relationship's] temperature every hour," which probably drives Pat batty. Chris also is needy, telling Pat: "You are the air inside my chest."
Then there is a clatter of hand drums, symbolizing discord. Suddenly, there is a break-up! And we start Part II: The Recrimination.
"You're the one!" accuses Chris. "You broke my heart. You made me cry." Here, Simon is mocking the pop-song convention of blaming the other party.
But some part of Chris is rational, after all. When piling on angles, Chris muses: "Maybe that's a waste of angles, I don't know." This part of Chris' mind, capable of analyzing and even debating against its own thoughts, comes back into play. This part asserts itself through a subconscious "dream." Now, Chris is able to put the capacity for anticipating others' needs into use, now, to see another's point of view: "But when I hear it from the other side/ It's a completely different song/ I'm the one who made you cry/ I'm the one who's wrong." [emphasis mine].
Then Simon gives us his moral of the story. Change is constant in "nature," he says, citing the amorphous "shapeless shapes" of "clouds and waves and flame." But "human expectation," unreasonably, "is that love remains the same."
So Chris does the obvious thing: "Blame, blame, blame." Whose fault is it? Chris, for being smothering and clingy? Pat, for not proving some sort of reassurance, or for enabling Chris' neediness to persist past the breaking point?
Yes, and yes-- it's everyone's fault, Simon concludes: "We're the one."
Next Song: The Teacher
Monday, October 15, 2012
Wahzinak's Last Letter/ Puerto Rican Day Parade/ El Coqui (Reprise)
"Wahzinak's Last Letter" is only one verse long, but it is very sad. In it, she says that the elders of her tribe forced her to "bury" the letters he sent her "in the blowing desert sand." Of course, this is a loss to her, but also to us, as those letters were likely not only very well-written but also would help us immeasurably in understanding our complicated Mr. Agron.
"Puerto Rican Day Parade" is about that-- a parade that, according to the organizer's website: "takes place along 5th Avenue on the second Sunday in June, in honor of the millions of inhabitants of Puerto Rico and (those) of Puerto Rican heritage in the U.S." The first verse, performed by a "singer," just tells us that the celebration is citywide.
The next verse lists several Spanish words that might be images on a parade float-- canoes and flags-- and also mini-coconuts and beer. What's a celebration without snacks and drinks?
"Because I am a Puerto Rican," the Spanish lyrics continue, explaining why he is celebrating today. "I was born a Puerto Rican (using a slang term for a native.) This line hearkens back to the earlier song "I Was Born in Puerto Rico," while the next line, "I am a brother of the coqui (a local tree frog)," recalls the children's chant the musical began with. (In America, an equivalent expression might be "I'm so American, my brother is a bald eagle."). "I'm as Puerto Rican as you like," the song concludes.
The purpose of this song is unclear. It may be to show that the community has moved on from the damage the Capeman case caused it. Or it may serve as an upbeat break in the heart-rending tale... or simply to contrast with the next song, which is about not the entire community but one man returning to it.
Offstage, the children-- this time in New York-- sing the nursery rhyme about the coqui the musical opened with. This serves to signal that our story is about to come full circle, that another generation of children is being taught the old ways in a new land, and maybe their lives will be better than his was.
Then it shifts to Salvador, on a pay phone (this was long before cell phones!) calling Yolanda to tell her he is on his way home, and that her husband Carlos (we assume they are married by now, if not living the country life they had planned) should know to get his things out of storage.
He hangs up, first telling Yolanda. "Don't tell my mother I'm home yet." Evidently, he wants to surprise her himself.
Salvador also doesn't ask for, or about Bernadette. Perhaps he assumes she has moved on by now. It is unclear, in this short verse, if he is going to stay with his mother or try to reconnect with Wahzinak.
Also there is a confusion of place that is more likely made clear by the action onstage. We have Salvador jumping parole to be with Wahzinak in Arizona ("Trailways Bus"), then being captured and sent back to prison. ("El Malecon," it is clear, is a flashback). Then the song "You Fucked Up My Life" takes place in the barrio, which implies he had been set free. Then "Lazarus/ Last Drop of Blood" seems to take place back in the Arizona desert. "Wahzinak's Last Letter," then, was addressed to him... where? And now he is back in the barrio, walking past the "Puerto Rican Day Parade" on his way home to his mother in this one-verse song, which implies that he had only just now been let out of jail.
In any case, the last four songs are set in New York. They will give us the final impressions of Salvador, Hernandez the Umbrella Man, Carlos and Yolanda, and lastly, Salvador's mother, Esmerelda.
Next Songs: Tony Hernandez/ Carlos & Yolanda
"Puerto Rican Day Parade" is about that-- a parade that, according to the organizer's website: "takes place along 5th Avenue on the second Sunday in June, in honor of the millions of inhabitants of Puerto Rico and (those) of Puerto Rican heritage in the U.S." The first verse, performed by a "singer," just tells us that the celebration is citywide.
The next verse lists several Spanish words that might be images on a parade float-- canoes and flags-- and also mini-coconuts and beer. What's a celebration without snacks and drinks?
"Because I am a Puerto Rican," the Spanish lyrics continue, explaining why he is celebrating today. "I was born a Puerto Rican (using a slang term for a native.) This line hearkens back to the earlier song "I Was Born in Puerto Rico," while the next line, "I am a brother of the coqui (a local tree frog)," recalls the children's chant the musical began with. (In America, an equivalent expression might be "I'm so American, my brother is a bald eagle."). "I'm as Puerto Rican as you like," the song concludes.
The purpose of this song is unclear. It may be to show that the community has moved on from the damage the Capeman case caused it. Or it may serve as an upbeat break in the heart-rending tale... or simply to contrast with the next song, which is about not the entire community but one man returning to it.
Offstage, the children-- this time in New York-- sing the nursery rhyme about the coqui the musical opened with. This serves to signal that our story is about to come full circle, that another generation of children is being taught the old ways in a new land, and maybe their lives will be better than his was.
Then it shifts to Salvador, on a pay phone (this was long before cell phones!) calling Yolanda to tell her he is on his way home, and that her husband Carlos (we assume they are married by now, if not living the country life they had planned) should know to get his things out of storage.
He hangs up, first telling Yolanda. "Don't tell my mother I'm home yet." Evidently, he wants to surprise her himself.
Salvador also doesn't ask for, or about Bernadette. Perhaps he assumes she has moved on by now. It is unclear, in this short verse, if he is going to stay with his mother or try to reconnect with Wahzinak.
Also there is a confusion of place that is more likely made clear by the action onstage. We have Salvador jumping parole to be with Wahzinak in Arizona ("Trailways Bus"), then being captured and sent back to prison. ("El Malecon," it is clear, is a flashback). Then the song "You Fucked Up My Life" takes place in the barrio, which implies he had been set free. Then "Lazarus/ Last Drop of Blood" seems to take place back in the Arizona desert. "Wahzinak's Last Letter," then, was addressed to him... where? And now he is back in the barrio, walking past the "Puerto Rican Day Parade" on his way home to his mother in this one-verse song, which implies that he had only just now been let out of jail.
In any case, the last four songs are set in New York. They will give us the final impressions of Salvador, Hernandez the Umbrella Man, Carlos and Yolanda, and lastly, Salvador's mother, Esmerelda.
Next Songs: Tony Hernandez/ Carlos & Yolanda
Monday, April 23, 2012
She Moves On
(Before I begin the analysis, I have to say that I am exceedingly disappointed with the Lyrics book here. The line is "Down in the maroon light," an evocative description of a sunset. The liner notes and website agree with this, which is what Simon's voice clearly says on the track. But the book has it as the simple, cliche "Down in the moonlight." Did anyone read this book before it was published? What's the point of having a book if its words cannot stand as THE definitive versions of the songs? All the book's editor needed to do was copy and paste from the website. Really! Not that this is the best move either-- the last word of the song, "on," is left off of the website version. Come on, people! Who's in charge, here? Listen to the songs, look at the liner notes, and get it right-- it's your job. I'm doing this in my spare time and I'm finding mistakes all over. OK, rant complete.)
The title says it-- She moves on. Ah, but he doesn't. He thinks he does. He thinks he did!
The song even starts: "I feel good/ It’s a fine day." He is at an airport, it is sunny, and "a cloud shifts." Since gray skies are gonna clear up, he's putting on a happy face. What happened? "She moves on."
Better to have loved and lost and all that. And he is OK with it. Well... sort of...
The speaker had really depended on her for a sort of salvation. He was "lost" and love "found" him (shades of "Amazing Grace"?). But when things change, and when he leaves the stage and "the song ends," well, "She moves on."
He feels happy just to be alive and to have survived having been left. But she just keeps... leaving! "She is like a top/ She cannot stop."
If, for example, "a sympathetic stranger" (himself, maybe?) um, "lights a candle in the middle of the night," or starts to spark something, she can't even handle that meager level of commitment and leaves again. Why a candle and not say, a torch? A candle is a religious, pure light.
She calls him her "storybook lover," perfect, and so too good to be true. She even warns him: "You have underestimated my power." This is not a candle, she says-- it's a stick of dynamite.
More worship imagery: "Then I fall to my knees/ Shake a rattle at the skies." He is now praying for her to stay, so he doesn't revert to being "lost" again; "I’m afraid that I’ll be... Abandoned, forsaken." Interesting that her eyes are like "coffee" only in their color-- they are not warm at all, but "cold."
Then, an interesting development. This woman, so insistent on keeping her distance and freedom, is somehow affected by him: "She can’t sleep now."
"The moon is red"-- this does happen, when certain particulate matter is in the atmosphere, or during a lunar eclipse. It is also a sign of the Revelation: "The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and awe–inspiring Day of the Lord comes."
So it's the end of the world! For him, because she does not want him. For her, because she does.
She can't sleep, she is so aroused and befuddled by him: "She fights a fever/ She burns in bed." This image of a feverish dream also appears in "How the Heart Approaches": "In a fever/ I distinctly hear your voice/ Emerging from a dream, the dream returns... I dream we are lying on the top of a hill... And your voice is the heat of the night/ I’m on fire."
So "she needs to talk." And instead of brushing this off as a case of "storybook" romance, she confides (in the "maroon" light of the "red" Moon, by the way!): “Maybe these emotions are/ As near to love as love will ever be.” This is as far as she has ever gone, emotionally, she says, and as far as he thinks she can go. But at least she was nice enough to tell him. What can he say? "So I agree."
Then "the moon breaks" (this may be sunrise) and the moment is over. "She takes the corner, that’s all she takes." While I am unclear if there is an expression "to take the corner" (British, maybe?) it is clear that she is not able to take any more than a small piece of him with her, again-- "that's all she takes." And... "she moves on."
The pain is a s bad as he had expected. Not just pain-- frailty, without her love there to prop him up. This time, he does not fall to his knees in worship, but in weakness: "I grow weak, I go slack." He can't "catch" his "breath," because she has "captured" it. He has had the wind knocked out of him.
But by the next morning, as he watched her plane lift off, he is fine. Before her, he was lost. Then he thought that, because she found him, he was found. But then she left... and remarkably, he didn't go back to being lost again!
So maybe he needed her... to show him that he didn't need her. Or anyone.
And she? She was just the catalyst for this reaction. Did she change at all, because of him? If so, not that much. She... well, as always, moves on.
MUSICAL NOTES: Raymond Chikapa Phiri-- Ray, for short-- one of the guitarists on this track, was the founder of Stimela, a gold and platinum-selling band from South Africa. He was one of the first artists, along with Joseph Shabalala, whom Simon worked with on the Graceland album.
Vincent Nguini, the other guitarist, is from Cameroon, but first worked with Simon on this album. He arranged the guitars for this track, and also "The Coast," and "Cool, Cool River," as well as the horns on "Proof."
Next Song: Born at the Right Time
The title says it-- She moves on. Ah, but he doesn't. He thinks he does. He thinks he did!
The song even starts: "I feel good/ It’s a fine day." He is at an airport, it is sunny, and "a cloud shifts." Since gray skies are gonna clear up, he's putting on a happy face. What happened? "She moves on."
Better to have loved and lost and all that. And he is OK with it. Well... sort of...
The speaker had really depended on her for a sort of salvation. He was "lost" and love "found" him (shades of "Amazing Grace"?). But when things change, and when he leaves the stage and "the song ends," well, "She moves on."
He feels happy just to be alive and to have survived having been left. But she just keeps... leaving! "She is like a top/ She cannot stop."
If, for example, "a sympathetic stranger" (himself, maybe?) um, "lights a candle in the middle of the night," or starts to spark something, she can't even handle that meager level of commitment and leaves again. Why a candle and not say, a torch? A candle is a religious, pure light.
She calls him her "storybook lover," perfect, and so too good to be true. She even warns him: "You have underestimated my power." This is not a candle, she says-- it's a stick of dynamite.
More worship imagery: "Then I fall to my knees/ Shake a rattle at the skies." He is now praying for her to stay, so he doesn't revert to being "lost" again; "I’m afraid that I’ll be... Abandoned, forsaken." Interesting that her eyes are like "coffee" only in their color-- they are not warm at all, but "cold."
Then, an interesting development. This woman, so insistent on keeping her distance and freedom, is somehow affected by him: "She can’t sleep now."
"The moon is red"-- this does happen, when certain particulate matter is in the atmosphere, or during a lunar eclipse. It is also a sign of the Revelation: "The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and awe–inspiring Day of the Lord comes."
So it's the end of the world! For him, because she does not want him. For her, because she does.
She can't sleep, she is so aroused and befuddled by him: "She fights a fever/ She burns in bed." This image of a feverish dream also appears in "How the Heart Approaches": "In a fever/ I distinctly hear your voice/ Emerging from a dream, the dream returns... I dream we are lying on the top of a hill... And your voice is the heat of the night/ I’m on fire."
So "she needs to talk." And instead of brushing this off as a case of "storybook" romance, she confides (in the "maroon" light of the "red" Moon, by the way!): “Maybe these emotions are/ As near to love as love will ever be.” This is as far as she has ever gone, emotionally, she says, and as far as he thinks she can go. But at least she was nice enough to tell him. What can he say? "So I agree."
Then "the moon breaks" (this may be sunrise) and the moment is over. "She takes the corner, that’s all she takes." While I am unclear if there is an expression "to take the corner" (British, maybe?) it is clear that she is not able to take any more than a small piece of him with her, again-- "that's all she takes." And... "she moves on."
The pain is a s bad as he had expected. Not just pain-- frailty, without her love there to prop him up. This time, he does not fall to his knees in worship, but in weakness: "I grow weak, I go slack." He can't "catch" his "breath," because she has "captured" it. He has had the wind knocked out of him.
But by the next morning, as he watched her plane lift off, he is fine. Before her, he was lost. Then he thought that, because she found him, he was found. But then she left... and remarkably, he didn't go back to being lost again!
So maybe he needed her... to show him that he didn't need her. Or anyone.
And she? She was just the catalyst for this reaction. Did she change at all, because of him? If so, not that much. She... well, as always, moves on.
MUSICAL NOTES: Raymond Chikapa Phiri-- Ray, for short-- one of the guitarists on this track, was the founder of Stimela, a gold and platinum-selling band from South Africa. He was one of the first artists, along with Joseph Shabalala, whom Simon worked with on the Graceland album.
Vincent Nguini, the other guitarist, is from Cameroon, but first worked with Simon on this album. He arranged the guitars for this track, and also "The Coast," and "Cool, Cool River," as well as the horns on "Proof."
Next Song: Born at the Right Time
Monday, February 20, 2012
Crazy Love, Vol II
The title immediately provokes the question: "Was there a 'Crazy Love, Vol I?'" A brief glance at an alphabetical listing of Simon's songs reveals none.
Perhaps, then, this is response to another songwriter's "Crazy Love"? Van Morrison had a song by that title; so did soft-rockers Poco. A quick online search reveals songs with that title by everyone from Sinatra to the Allman Brothers. So which "Crazy Love" is this the supposed sequel to?
I think it is none of them, specifically... and all of them in general. More to the point, it might not be a sequel to a song at all, but to the kind of love the songs are about.
What really happens to that crazy kind of love? Joan Rivers explains that romance is like running up a grassy hill. "And do you know what's on the other side of that hill?" she continues. "A basket of laundry, full of socks to be matched."
This song is about the discovery of that basket of laundry, and what happens after. It is the heretofore unsung "Vol. II" that must follow all such blissfully madcap crazy love stories after the credits roll.
The song begins by introducing a man with two nicknames. One is "Archangel," which implies he is a being of some importance and weight. The other (later to be revealed as more recent) is "Fat Charlie," also connoting a being with some weight, but this time the kind doctors discourage.
(We must take a moment to applaud the Wallace Stevens-esque opening line: "Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room." That is not a line that could have remotely been conceived by any other songwriter, living or otherwise.)
Charlie is full not only of eclairs but ennui. He has "no opinion" about anything. He is aware of his "sad" mental state, telling his friends: "I don't claim to be happy" about things, even the things he just sad he had no opinion regarding. They do notice that he is as "sad" as a deflated "balloon," in contrast to his inflated shape-- just as his being "lonely" contrasts with the fact that he is married (which, again, is revealed later).
He is sure, however, on one point, which he repeats with great insistence: "I don’t want no part of this crazy love/ I don’t want no part of your love."
Charlie has come, perhaps to a bar, to gripe about his marriage. As often happens, he starts with, "Do you know what she said? Listen to this! She says the joke is on me!"
One of his friends replies, we imagine: "Oh, yeah?! What'd ya tell her?"
He is so apathetic, or perhaps so beaten down, that even this affront is met with, "I have no opinion about that." Then with terrible self-knowledge, he admits: "And I have no opinion about me."
Even if Charlie can no longer muster enough self-respect to be angered, his friends are distraught on his behalf. "Charlie," they tell him, "You're in trouble, friend! And, given your Archangel position, everyone knows it!" Simon phrases their response thus; “Your life is on fire! It’s all over the evening news.”
This exchange does seem to stoke Charlie's ire a bit; he unleashes another barrage of "I don't want no part of this crazy love."
And then Charlie takes action. The joke is no longer on him, because he is the one who "files for divorce."
Like the weighty personage he is, he takes stock and plans for the future: "Well, this will eat up a year of my life/ and then there’s all that weight to be lost." This indicates that he was not heavy before the marriage and let himself go during it. Now that he is going to be "back on the market" he plans to work to become as attractive as he once was.
Also, Charlie is now giving as good as he gets: "She says the joke is on me/ I say the joke is on her!" Not the most original of retorts, but at least a "Hah-- So there!"
But then he undercuts himself. "I said I have no opinion about that/ We'll just have to wait on confer." Wait, what? He has no opinion about what he himself just said? And now he wants to "confer" and arbitrate as to whom the joke is on? Oh, dear.
How will Charlie end up, now that he is single? Will he regain the fierce gravitas that earned him the rank of Archangel? Or will he, even now, still worry about what she thinks, since he has been so trained to?
The love was "crazy," and like all intense flames, burnt itself out. Now Charlie himself is burnt out. The damage seems to be deep, but we don't know how lasting. We do know that he was powerful before, and that he has friends who care enough about him to tell him the truth and encourage his return to emotional health.
Also, his last tirade-- again against his ex-wife's "crazy love"-- gives us hope that he has learned his lesson and stays away from "crazy love" in the future. And that there is no "Vol III," but a whole new story.
"Sane love" might not sell books, movies, or songs... but at least Charlie will be able to afford those entertainments again once he has finished paying off his divorce attorney. If he even wants to listen to such songs again (which he probably shouldn't).
Next Song: "That Was Your Mother"
Perhaps, then, this is response to another songwriter's "Crazy Love"? Van Morrison had a song by that title; so did soft-rockers Poco. A quick online search reveals songs with that title by everyone from Sinatra to the Allman Brothers. So which "Crazy Love" is this the supposed sequel to?
I think it is none of them, specifically... and all of them in general. More to the point, it might not be a sequel to a song at all, but to the kind of love the songs are about.
What really happens to that crazy kind of love? Joan Rivers explains that romance is like running up a grassy hill. "And do you know what's on the other side of that hill?" she continues. "A basket of laundry, full of socks to be matched."
This song is about the discovery of that basket of laundry, and what happens after. It is the heretofore unsung "Vol. II" that must follow all such blissfully madcap crazy love stories after the credits roll.
The song begins by introducing a man with two nicknames. One is "Archangel," which implies he is a being of some importance and weight. The other (later to be revealed as more recent) is "Fat Charlie," also connoting a being with some weight, but this time the kind doctors discourage.
(We must take a moment to applaud the Wallace Stevens-esque opening line: "Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room." That is not a line that could have remotely been conceived by any other songwriter, living or otherwise.)
Charlie is full not only of eclairs but ennui. He has "no opinion" about anything. He is aware of his "sad" mental state, telling his friends: "I don't claim to be happy" about things, even the things he just sad he had no opinion regarding. They do notice that he is as "sad" as a deflated "balloon," in contrast to his inflated shape-- just as his being "lonely" contrasts with the fact that he is married (which, again, is revealed later).
He is sure, however, on one point, which he repeats with great insistence: "I don’t want no part of this crazy love/ I don’t want no part of your love."
Charlie has come, perhaps to a bar, to gripe about his marriage. As often happens, he starts with, "Do you know what she said? Listen to this! She says the joke is on me!"
One of his friends replies, we imagine: "Oh, yeah?! What'd ya tell her?"
He is so apathetic, or perhaps so beaten down, that even this affront is met with, "I have no opinion about that." Then with terrible self-knowledge, he admits: "And I have no opinion about me."
Even if Charlie can no longer muster enough self-respect to be angered, his friends are distraught on his behalf. "Charlie," they tell him, "You're in trouble, friend! And, given your Archangel position, everyone knows it!" Simon phrases their response thus; “Your life is on fire! It’s all over the evening news.”
This exchange does seem to stoke Charlie's ire a bit; he unleashes another barrage of "I don't want no part of this crazy love."
And then Charlie takes action. The joke is no longer on him, because he is the one who "files for divorce."
Like the weighty personage he is, he takes stock and plans for the future: "Well, this will eat up a year of my life/ and then there’s all that weight to be lost." This indicates that he was not heavy before the marriage and let himself go during it. Now that he is going to be "back on the market" he plans to work to become as attractive as he once was.
Also, Charlie is now giving as good as he gets: "She says the joke is on me/ I say the joke is on her!" Not the most original of retorts, but at least a "Hah-- So there!"
But then he undercuts himself. "I said I have no opinion about that/ We'll just have to wait on confer." Wait, what? He has no opinion about what he himself just said? And now he wants to "confer" and arbitrate as to whom the joke is on? Oh, dear.
How will Charlie end up, now that he is single? Will he regain the fierce gravitas that earned him the rank of Archangel? Or will he, even now, still worry about what she thinks, since he has been so trained to?
The love was "crazy," and like all intense flames, burnt itself out. Now Charlie himself is burnt out. The damage seems to be deep, but we don't know how lasting. We do know that he was powerful before, and that he has friends who care enough about him to tell him the truth and encourage his return to emotional health.
Also, his last tirade-- again against his ex-wife's "crazy love"-- gives us hope that he has learned his lesson and stays away from "crazy love" in the future. And that there is no "Vol III," but a whole new story.
"Sane love" might not sell books, movies, or songs... but at least Charlie will be able to afford those entertainments again once he has finished paying off his divorce attorney. If he even wants to listen to such songs again (which he probably shouldn't).
Next Song: "That Was Your Mother"
Monday, January 2, 2012
Graceland
While a trip to Elvis Presley's (in)famous Graceland estate is the set-up for this song, it's more about a state of grace than an actual, geographical place. Like Graceland itself, it is a place in which all are welcomed. (I even know the couple who had the mansion's first Jewish wedding; the skullcaps given to guests where made of-- what else-- blue suede.)
The trip that sets off the stream-of-consciousness lyrics seems to proceed northward from the "Mississippi Delta," perhaps down Nawlins way (that's "New Orleans," with the local accent), upstream along the river itself, through the former Confederate States, to "Memphis, Tennessee." So the word "down" in "down the highway" is to be taken as "along," not "southward"; perhaps it should be "up the highway," but in songs it's always "down the highway."
National is a brand of guitar. The maker specializes in the "dobro" a guitar with a steel plate mostly covering the soundhole (You can see one on the cover of the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms). This guitar can be played vertically or horizontally, usually with a slide and thimble-like picks (called "plectrums") and is known for its tremolo, or warbling, twangy sound. Simon is comparing the sunshine reflecting off the Delta wetlands to the shiny steel plate on this guitar, favored in country music.
"Poorboys" could be taken as "poor boys," simply "needy people," the kind that throng to a shrine like "pilgrims." But a "poorboy" is also local slang for a kind of large sandwich elsewhere known as a "hero" or "submarine" sandwich (or a "hoagie" or "grinder"). By adding some local slang, Simon is trying to evoke a sense of place. As it happens, the "Civil War" is in this area known as "The War Between the States"... but "Civil War" rhymes better with "National guitar."
Another way Simon proves his Southern bona-fides on the track is including The Everly Brothers themselves on high background harmonies (called "descants," technically). Don Everly was born in Kentucky... then Phil in Chicago, but still.
Who are the pilgrims in thos speaker's car? Himself and his son, who-- if the speaker is Simon-- is Harper, the "child of [Simon's] first marriage," to Peggy Harper. I have not done the math, but "nine years old" seems reasonable.
"But I’ve reason to believe/ We both will be received/ In Graceland." There could not have been a doubt about his son, an innocent child, being thus received. The doubt, which is here brushed away, must have been about himself, now a double divorcee.
This thought leads to its source, the memory of his love's leaving: "She comes back to tell me she’s gone." She seems to come to collect her things and let him know that her leaving is, in fact, permanent. He fumes at the insult to his intelligence: "As if I didn’t know my own bed." He knows her so well, he knows what "the way she brushed her hair from her forehead" means.
Then she makes an interesting observation-- a divorce, the loss of a love, is a public matter. As if being able to peer through "a window in your heart," everyone will know that you are devastated, "blown apart." Furthermore, those people will also feel the impact and shock wave: "Everybody feels the wind blow.”
Here, the website, liner notes, and book dispute the line. These first two sources have "Everybody sees the wind blow," which would imply people appreciate the impact but are not affected by it, which the Lyrics book says they are. Here's how this dispute breaks down, also taking the repeat of the chorus into account. The website has "Everybody sees the wind blow" both times; the liner notes have "sees" and then "feels"; the book has "feels" both times!
So we listen to the song. Simon sings "sees" the first time and "feels" the second time. The liner notes win. And this makes sense. The first time thinking the incident through, a person might only focus on himself: "Everyone sees my devastation, and I am exposed." The second time, he might see what impact his sadness and anger have had on those around him: "Everyone feels my devastation; I should be compassionate toward them, too."
And, on the second time through, the speaker realizes that he has more in his car than himself and his son. He has the skeletons from his closets, "ghosts and empty sockets."
The throw-away line that repeats changes "empty [eye] sockets" to "empties," usually a reference to empty cans or bottles of beer, as in "We should return these empties for a refund at the store." The sight of all the empties of beers consumed during a period mourning over a lost love, strewn around the floor the following morning, is a sobering thought. (Don Henley has a song with the lines: "If you still want to hold her, you must not be drinking enough.")
What else might keep someone out of grace, aside from losing love, and so now having no love? What about too much love? We'll have to find someone who has that issue and ask them. How about a girl who is, um, "bounced" on so often even she calls herself "The Human Trampoline," as if she were a circus sideshow attraction?
The speaker, who does not have that sort of chaos in his life, nevertheless knows "turmoil" of the kind a trampoline causes: "falling, flying... tumbling" in uncertainty. Yes, yes-- even someone that tumultuous can, um, "bounce" into grace.
And now the speaker is ready to admit that he was not the only one impacted by the explosions in his life. To be fair, when his former lover told him this to begin with, she may have been speaking about herself, or telling him what to expect, from her own experience.
Simon, in interviews, has said that, when he was a teen, he wanted to be Elvis (Simon has admitted to the song being influenced by Presley's "Mystery Train"). So the idea of making a pilgrimage to Graceland, the source of his artistic inspiration, at a time of reassessment, should not surprise him so much: "For reasons I cannot explain/ There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland." Isn't this album, recorded on a trip to Africa-- the ultimate source of even Elvis' music-- just a further exploration on that same journey?
So what does grace mean? The word "unconditional" often precedes the word "love," but we have just seen that romantic love is not necessarily unconditional. There are everything from divorces to one-night stands. And what if "I may be obliged to defend/ Every love, every ending," worries the speaker, so used to-- so conditioned to-- conditional love. "What if I can't justify or excuse my actions well enough-- won't I be refused?"
And then the key realization dawns and the beginning of grace is achieved. "Or maybe," he wonders, "maybe there’s no obligations now." Maybe love is conditional when it is human love, and only God's grace is pure, obligation-free, and unconditional.
If that's true, it's true for everyone: "Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/ We all will be received/ In Graceland." All. Everyone. Even him.
IMPACT:
The song won the Grammy for Record of the Year, which goes to the person or people who performed and recorded the song (as opposed to Song of the Year, which goes to the songwriter. That year, 1988, that went to "Somewhere Out There," from An American Tail.). (Album of the Year is for the entire album. We'll see if that's phased out as downloads take over...)
The song hit charts internationally, going to 81 in the US, 98 in the UK, and 70 in Canada, and all the way to 27 in Ireland. It also cracked the top 100 in Australia and The Netherlands, and the Top 40 in New Zealand and Belgium.
It has been covered by everyone from Willie Nelson and Coldplay's Chris Martin to, inevitably, Elvis impersonators. Also a band with the clever, if sad, name of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.
Next Song: I Know What I Know
The trip that sets off the stream-of-consciousness lyrics seems to proceed northward from the "Mississippi Delta," perhaps down Nawlins way (that's "New Orleans," with the local accent), upstream along the river itself, through the former Confederate States, to "Memphis, Tennessee." So the word "down" in "down the highway" is to be taken as "along," not "southward"; perhaps it should be "up the highway," but in songs it's always "down the highway."
National is a brand of guitar. The maker specializes in the "dobro" a guitar with a steel plate mostly covering the soundhole (You can see one on the cover of the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms). This guitar can be played vertically or horizontally, usually with a slide and thimble-like picks (called "plectrums") and is known for its tremolo, or warbling, twangy sound. Simon is comparing the sunshine reflecting off the Delta wetlands to the shiny steel plate on this guitar, favored in country music.
"Poorboys" could be taken as "poor boys," simply "needy people," the kind that throng to a shrine like "pilgrims." But a "poorboy" is also local slang for a kind of large sandwich elsewhere known as a "hero" or "submarine" sandwich (or a "hoagie" or "grinder"). By adding some local slang, Simon is trying to evoke a sense of place. As it happens, the "Civil War" is in this area known as "The War Between the States"... but "Civil War" rhymes better with "National guitar."
Another way Simon proves his Southern bona-fides on the track is including The Everly Brothers themselves on high background harmonies (called "descants," technically). Don Everly was born in Kentucky... then Phil in Chicago, but still.
Who are the pilgrims in thos speaker's car? Himself and his son, who-- if the speaker is Simon-- is Harper, the "child of [Simon's] first marriage," to Peggy Harper. I have not done the math, but "nine years old" seems reasonable.
"But I’ve reason to believe/ We both will be received/ In Graceland." There could not have been a doubt about his son, an innocent child, being thus received. The doubt, which is here brushed away, must have been about himself, now a double divorcee.
This thought leads to its source, the memory of his love's leaving: "She comes back to tell me she’s gone." She seems to come to collect her things and let him know that her leaving is, in fact, permanent. He fumes at the insult to his intelligence: "As if I didn’t know my own bed." He knows her so well, he knows what "the way she brushed her hair from her forehead" means.
Then she makes an interesting observation-- a divorce, the loss of a love, is a public matter. As if being able to peer through "a window in your heart," everyone will know that you are devastated, "blown apart." Furthermore, those people will also feel the impact and shock wave: "Everybody feels the wind blow.”
Here, the website, liner notes, and book dispute the line. These first two sources have "Everybody sees the wind blow," which would imply people appreciate the impact but are not affected by it, which the Lyrics book says they are. Here's how this dispute breaks down, also taking the repeat of the chorus into account. The website has "Everybody sees the wind blow" both times; the liner notes have "sees" and then "feels"; the book has "feels" both times!
So we listen to the song. Simon sings "sees" the first time and "feels" the second time. The liner notes win. And this makes sense. The first time thinking the incident through, a person might only focus on himself: "Everyone sees my devastation, and I am exposed." The second time, he might see what impact his sadness and anger have had on those around him: "Everyone feels my devastation; I should be compassionate toward them, too."
And, on the second time through, the speaker realizes that he has more in his car than himself and his son. He has the skeletons from his closets, "ghosts and empty sockets."
The throw-away line that repeats changes "empty [eye] sockets" to "empties," usually a reference to empty cans or bottles of beer, as in "We should return these empties for a refund at the store." The sight of all the empties of beers consumed during a period mourning over a lost love, strewn around the floor the following morning, is a sobering thought. (Don Henley has a song with the lines: "If you still want to hold her, you must not be drinking enough.")
What else might keep someone out of grace, aside from losing love, and so now having no love? What about too much love? We'll have to find someone who has that issue and ask them. How about a girl who is, um, "bounced" on so often even she calls herself "The Human Trampoline," as if she were a circus sideshow attraction?
The speaker, who does not have that sort of chaos in his life, nevertheless knows "turmoil" of the kind a trampoline causes: "falling, flying... tumbling" in uncertainty. Yes, yes-- even someone that tumultuous can, um, "bounce" into grace.
And now the speaker is ready to admit that he was not the only one impacted by the explosions in his life. To be fair, when his former lover told him this to begin with, she may have been speaking about herself, or telling him what to expect, from her own experience.
Simon, in interviews, has said that, when he was a teen, he wanted to be Elvis (Simon has admitted to the song being influenced by Presley's "Mystery Train"). So the idea of making a pilgrimage to Graceland, the source of his artistic inspiration, at a time of reassessment, should not surprise him so much: "For reasons I cannot explain/ There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland." Isn't this album, recorded on a trip to Africa-- the ultimate source of even Elvis' music-- just a further exploration on that same journey?
So what does grace mean? The word "unconditional" often precedes the word "love," but we have just seen that romantic love is not necessarily unconditional. There are everything from divorces to one-night stands. And what if "I may be obliged to defend/ Every love, every ending," worries the speaker, so used to-- so conditioned to-- conditional love. "What if I can't justify or excuse my actions well enough-- won't I be refused?"
And then the key realization dawns and the beginning of grace is achieved. "Or maybe," he wonders, "maybe there’s no obligations now." Maybe love is conditional when it is human love, and only God's grace is pure, obligation-free, and unconditional.
If that's true, it's true for everyone: "Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/ We all will be received/ In Graceland." All. Everyone. Even him.
IMPACT:
The song won the Grammy for Record of the Year, which goes to the person or people who performed and recorded the song (as opposed to Song of the Year, which goes to the songwriter. That year, 1988, that went to "Somewhere Out There," from An American Tail.). (Album of the Year is for the entire album. We'll see if that's phased out as downloads take over...)
The song hit charts internationally, going to 81 in the US, 98 in the UK, and 70 in Canada, and all the way to 27 in Ireland. It also cracked the top 100 in Australia and The Netherlands, and the Top 40 in New Zealand and Belgium.
It has been covered by everyone from Willie Nelson and Coldplay's Chris Martin to, inevitably, Elvis impersonators. Also a band with the clever, if sad, name of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.
Next Song: I Know What I Know
Monday, November 14, 2011
Train in the Distance
Is it necessary to analyze this song? It's one of the most straightforward of all of Simon's songs, telling the story of a marriage, from its prelude through to its epilogue. The "moral of the story" is even spelled out in the final chorus.
Now, there is a mistake in the lyrics at Simon's website. It says "He was old/she was young." This is wrong. In the song itself, Simon seems to sing: "He was old/ he was young." This, while it seems self-contradictory, is corroborated by two sources. One is the liner notes of the album.
The other is the new book Lyrics: 1964-2011, which I purchased at Paul Simon's concert here in the Chicago area last night. (Now that the book is out, someone at the website should really spend a couple of days doing line-by-line proofreading.)
The difference is enormous. The incorrect version seems a simple statement of fact as to their relative ages. The correct version provides one of the only enigmatic lines of the whole song. "He was old," in years, perhaps-- but in every other way, he was "young." Romantic, impulsive, ambitious...
The story starts with a older man attracted to a younger, married woman (her husband is immaterial to all concerned, dismissed as a mere "someone"). Our hero would "tip his heart" instead of his hand (the term comes from playing cards), meaning that he made his amorous intentions known. But even though she initially "withdrew," she hears the sound of the distant train as much as he does ("everybody" hears, it, after all).
The next steps seem automatic and inevitable: "Eventually" they marry, "sure enough" they have a boy. But even while she was pregnant, "disagreements had begun."
It is not clear when the child is born, relative to their divorce. But divorce they do, although they "they remain in contact." The line "Let us say it’s for the child," implies that this is not the true reason, but one that seems reasonable and acceptable to both and to the families and community involved (is the real reason that they are still somewhat attracted to each other?).
The word "disagreements" comes up again, this time with regard to the "marriage contract," but again more is going on. Certainly lawyers can (although expensively) debate that, professionally and coolly. Their "conversations," meanwhile are "hard and wild" and obviously about things more personal and intimate than just legalities.
Was there something,,, there? Well, "from time to time, he just makes her laugh/ She cooks a meal or two." Here, we have a disagreement, to borrow a word, about lyrics again. The website and album notes say "he makes her laugh," while the song itself and the Lyrics book have it "he just makes her laugh." This is not as crucial an issue as the disputed pronoun above, but it does go to a central theme of the song.
Which is that it had to happen this way, going back to when he "doggedly" hounded and wooed her. This goes through the "eventual" and "sure enough" phases discussed above to how they "just fell apart." And now, he "just makes her laugh." He doesn't seem to mean to, but something he says "just" strikes her as terribly amusing.
The narrative breaks, during the divorce chapter, for the speaker to insert an observation about the characters: "Two disappointed believers/ Two people playing the game." They do believe in love, but are disappointed by marriage. Instead of loving each other and working toward compromises for the advancement of the union, they are "playing" against each other, each trying to win and advance his or her own interests.
The phrase "negotiations and love songs" would become the title of one of Simon's compilations of hits, but here it means that love songs, through which one hopes to win the heart of the other, are often little more then sales pitches, in which the singer hopes to win, period. But while dogs chase cars, what would a dog do with a car if it caught one? What good is winning if, now that you have sealed the deal and gotten married, the game is over? Then the power struggle moves into the marriage itself, with everyone losing.
Why? Why does all of this have to happen, with the forgone nature of one "train" car following the next down a predetermined track?
It is not outside fate exactly, Simon theorizes, but how our brains are wired (or "woven") for ambition and improvement of our situations: "The thought that life could be better/ Is woven indelibly/ Into our hearts/ And our brains."
It's not the song that needs to be explained, after all. It's the people in the story, a tale so lacking in detail that the characters never even get names. We have all heard of some couple that this story, in some form, has happened to. So it is important to ask why such a story is so sadly common.
Still, there is some growth. "The boy and the girl get married," but after they divorce, "the man and the woman remain in contact." They haven't simply grown older, they have grown up.
And, if either one does marry again, it might actually go "better." For her, she left her first marriage for this man. But this time, she leaves her second husband for herself. Certainly, she will have to be mature enough to think of the impact this would have for her child. But if she does marry again, it should be for the right reasons.
Meanwhile, he was old when he started this adventure, and now he is a father. Still, he is "dogged" and "young" in a way, so maybe he will have another shot as well.
Did ambition and competition destroy this marriage, even before it had begun? Yes. Will the same thing happen in the next go-round? Well, as Samuel Johnson explained, "Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience."
Next Song: Rene And George Magritte with Their Dog After The War
Now, there is a mistake in the lyrics at Simon's website. It says "He was old/she was young." This is wrong. In the song itself, Simon seems to sing: "He was old/ he was young." This, while it seems self-contradictory, is corroborated by two sources. One is the liner notes of the album.
The other is the new book Lyrics: 1964-2011, which I purchased at Paul Simon's concert here in the Chicago area last night. (Now that the book is out, someone at the website should really spend a couple of days doing line-by-line proofreading.)
The difference is enormous. The incorrect version seems a simple statement of fact as to their relative ages. The correct version provides one of the only enigmatic lines of the whole song. "He was old," in years, perhaps-- but in every other way, he was "young." Romantic, impulsive, ambitious...
The story starts with a older man attracted to a younger, married woman (her husband is immaterial to all concerned, dismissed as a mere "someone"). Our hero would "tip his heart" instead of his hand (the term comes from playing cards), meaning that he made his amorous intentions known. But even though she initially "withdrew," she hears the sound of the distant train as much as he does ("everybody" hears, it, after all).
The next steps seem automatic and inevitable: "Eventually" they marry, "sure enough" they have a boy. But even while she was pregnant, "disagreements had begun."
It is not clear when the child is born, relative to their divorce. But divorce they do, although they "they remain in contact." The line "Let us say it’s for the child," implies that this is not the true reason, but one that seems reasonable and acceptable to both and to the families and community involved (is the real reason that they are still somewhat attracted to each other?).
The word "disagreements" comes up again, this time with regard to the "marriage contract," but again more is going on. Certainly lawyers can (although expensively) debate that, professionally and coolly. Their "conversations," meanwhile are "hard and wild" and obviously about things more personal and intimate than just legalities.
Was there something,,, there? Well, "from time to time, he just makes her laugh/ She cooks a meal or two." Here, we have a disagreement, to borrow a word, about lyrics again. The website and album notes say "he makes her laugh," while the song itself and the Lyrics book have it "he just makes her laugh." This is not as crucial an issue as the disputed pronoun above, but it does go to a central theme of the song.
Which is that it had to happen this way, going back to when he "doggedly" hounded and wooed her. This goes through the "eventual" and "sure enough" phases discussed above to how they "just fell apart." And now, he "just makes her laugh." He doesn't seem to mean to, but something he says "just" strikes her as terribly amusing.
The narrative breaks, during the divorce chapter, for the speaker to insert an observation about the characters: "Two disappointed believers/ Two people playing the game." They do believe in love, but are disappointed by marriage. Instead of loving each other and working toward compromises for the advancement of the union, they are "playing" against each other, each trying to win and advance his or her own interests.
The phrase "negotiations and love songs" would become the title of one of Simon's compilations of hits, but here it means that love songs, through which one hopes to win the heart of the other, are often little more then sales pitches, in which the singer hopes to win, period. But while dogs chase cars, what would a dog do with a car if it caught one? What good is winning if, now that you have sealed the deal and gotten married, the game is over? Then the power struggle moves into the marriage itself, with everyone losing.
Why? Why does all of this have to happen, with the forgone nature of one "train" car following the next down a predetermined track?
It is not outside fate exactly, Simon theorizes, but how our brains are wired (or "woven") for ambition and improvement of our situations: "The thought that life could be better/ Is woven indelibly/ Into our hearts/ And our brains."
It's not the song that needs to be explained, after all. It's the people in the story, a tale so lacking in detail that the characters never even get names. We have all heard of some couple that this story, in some form, has happened to. So it is important to ask why such a story is so sadly common.
Still, there is some growth. "The boy and the girl get married," but after they divorce, "the man and the woman remain in contact." They haven't simply grown older, they have grown up.
And, if either one does marry again, it might actually go "better." For her, she left her first marriage for this man. But this time, she leaves her second husband for herself. Certainly, she will have to be mature enough to think of the impact this would have for her child. But if she does marry again, it should be for the right reasons.
Meanwhile, he was old when he started this adventure, and now he is a father. Still, he is "dogged" and "young" in a way, so maybe he will have another shot as well.
Did ambition and competition destroy this marriage, even before it had begun? Yes. Will the same thing happen in the next go-round? Well, as Samuel Johnson explained, "Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience."
Next Song: Rene And George Magritte with Their Dog After The War
Monday, October 24, 2011
Think Too Much (b)
This second half of a diptypch is presented first. Both halves discuss the two halves of the brain, repeating the idea that "the left side... dominates the right." The left side being the logical, rational, objective half, while the right is creative, emotional, and subjective. (Similar to the idea of, respectively, Yang and Yin.)
By the language, this one seems to be the logical half, at least at first. It begins with the image of "the smartest people in the word" being "gathered" to-- and here is the key word-- "analyze" a broken love affair.
The team is as thorough as one from the forensic shows now overwhelming our televisions. The analysts didn't just look at the couple's evidence, they scrutinized it; "They sat among our photographs/ Examined every one," which took until sunrise. The result? "In the end, we compromised," a traditionally logical conclusion.
But then comes the chorus, which is only the line "Maybe I think too much," repeated. Maybe, even after all of this analytic work, analysis is not the way to approach a broken relationship, or a broken heart. Maybe overanalysis was the issue that caused some of the problem to begin with.
In "Slip-Slidin' Away," a father comes "a long way" to explain himself to his son, only to leave the son to sleep. This time, the father is more demonstrative: "In the night, my father came to me/ And held me to his chest./ He said, 'There's not much more that you can do/ Go and get some rest.'"
Getting some rest after a night of rehashing a broken love might be the logical thing to do, but only because it recognizes that hearts (and bones) have their limits. The father does more for this man than did all of "the smartest people in the world," because he does not try to analyze a problem. He simply tries to care for his son.
The son responds "Yeah, maybe I think too much." Maybe, the speaker realizes, the right response is not to overthink how overthinking his relationship led to his spending the night overthinking how it collapsed. Maybe he should just go to bed.
The song is brief, but it contains a powerful message. This time, Simon (if he is the speaker) is not "weary to his bones" after a "long, long day" of working songwriting or touring or running his office or even "weary from waiting down in Washington DC."
He is emotionally exhausted from dealing with the pain of his failed relationship. He wants to exhibit some emotion, which cannot be avoided after poring over one photo album after another, filled with images and memories. Yet all night was spent "examining" the pictures, using the wrong side of his brain. His brain, furthermore, and not his heart.
Maybe one can think "too much." Maybe sometimes the right thing to do-- the logical thing to do-- is to feel. Now it is time to "get some rest" and let the right side, the side of emotion, "labor through the long and speechless night," spinning out dreams.
This at first seems a negative thing to the speaker. In both the (b) and (a) halves of this song, the right side is said to have to "work hard" or "labor" all night, as if this were a punishment for allowing itself to be dominated.
But in both songs it's remarked that "they say" one side dominates. In these songs-- and we will have to conclude this discussion when (a) shows up two songs from now-- this conventional wisdom seems to be challenged.
So which side does Simon come down on? We'll have to see. In the meantime, don't think too much about it.
Next Song: Song About the Moon
By the language, this one seems to be the logical half, at least at first. It begins with the image of "the smartest people in the word" being "gathered" to-- and here is the key word-- "analyze" a broken love affair.
The team is as thorough as one from the forensic shows now overwhelming our televisions. The analysts didn't just look at the couple's evidence, they scrutinized it; "They sat among our photographs/ Examined every one," which took until sunrise. The result? "In the end, we compromised," a traditionally logical conclusion.
But then comes the chorus, which is only the line "Maybe I think too much," repeated. Maybe, even after all of this analytic work, analysis is not the way to approach a broken relationship, or a broken heart. Maybe overanalysis was the issue that caused some of the problem to begin with.
In "Slip-Slidin' Away," a father comes "a long way" to explain himself to his son, only to leave the son to sleep. This time, the father is more demonstrative: "In the night, my father came to me/ And held me to his chest./ He said, 'There's not much more that you can do/ Go and get some rest.'"
Getting some rest after a night of rehashing a broken love might be the logical thing to do, but only because it recognizes that hearts (and bones) have their limits. The father does more for this man than did all of "the smartest people in the world," because he does not try to analyze a problem. He simply tries to care for his son.
The son responds "Yeah, maybe I think too much." Maybe, the speaker realizes, the right response is not to overthink how overthinking his relationship led to his spending the night overthinking how it collapsed. Maybe he should just go to bed.
The song is brief, but it contains a powerful message. This time, Simon (if he is the speaker) is not "weary to his bones" after a "long, long day" of working songwriting or touring or running his office or even "weary from waiting down in Washington DC."
He is emotionally exhausted from dealing with the pain of his failed relationship. He wants to exhibit some emotion, which cannot be avoided after poring over one photo album after another, filled with images and memories. Yet all night was spent "examining" the pictures, using the wrong side of his brain. His brain, furthermore, and not his heart.
Maybe one can think "too much." Maybe sometimes the right thing to do-- the logical thing to do-- is to feel. Now it is time to "get some rest" and let the right side, the side of emotion, "labor through the long and speechless night," spinning out dreams.
This at first seems a negative thing to the speaker. In both the (b) and (a) halves of this song, the right side is said to have to "work hard" or "labor" all night, as if this were a punishment for allowing itself to be dominated.
But in both songs it's remarked that "they say" one side dominates. In these songs-- and we will have to conclude this discussion when (a) shows up two songs from now-- this conventional wisdom seems to be challenged.
So which side does Simon come down on? We'll have to see. In the meantime, don't think too much about it.
Next Song: Song About the Moon
Monday, October 10, 2011
Hearts and Bones
Before we get into the song, it is important to note some dates. The song was copyrighted 1982, and the album on which it appeared was released in 1983. Paul Simon married his second wife, actor/author Carrie Fisher, in 1983, and they divorced in 1984, one month shy of their first anniversary. (True, they had dated since 1977, but still.)
So, while it is tempting to say that the song is about this couple and the dissolution of their marriage, Simon wrote it before they were married and released it before they were divorced. So it's about some other couple, or an imaginary one. Either that, or Simon predicted the ending of the marriage before he even proposed.
The opening line certainly lends itself to the speculation that the subjects are Simon and Fisher. Simon is Jewish; Fisher is Jewish on her father's side, which some count as only being "half Jewish," since Judaism is traditionally a matrilineal (passed down through the mother's side) religion.
The couple, whomever they are, are "free to wander wherever they choose" (which may be a riff on the idea of the "wandering Jew," and perhaps even the idea of the Jews being "the chosen people.") But then, during a trip to New Mexico, they choose differently from one another. (The Latinate guitars and drums of the region are heard throughout the song.)
It is significant that they are in the Sangre de Christo mountains. As the song itself explains, the range is named for the blood of Jesus, the ultimate martyr. Someone here feels that they are sacrificing themselves.
The journey is supposed to be ending; it's on its "last leg." The "arc" of their relationship is compared to a "rainbow," which is both beautiful and illusory. They are "high" in the mountains, where the air is thin and hallucinations are possible. Also, while there must have been rain for there to be rainbows, the area is a "desert" and bereft of the practical needs to sustain life. "Mountain passes," or pre-cut trails, are also becoming "stone," and more difficult to navigate. As pretty as things appear superficially, they are in fact bad and getting worse.
Then the man begins to wonder when the trouble started. He recalls a wedding that was somewhat scandalous-- "The act was outrageous"-- and the bride may have gone through with the wedding even though she was ill. She was "contagious," and she "burned" with a fever.
Either that, or her fervor caused his girlfriend, with whom he is travelling now, to catch the wedding bug: "These events may have had some effect/On the man with the girl by his side." Wait, what was the effect on him? Did her passion stir his, in turn? "His hands rolling down her hair/Love like lightning, shaking till it moans," is a very evocative phrasing (and it's better than what Simon came up with in "How the Heart Approaches": "I roll in your arms/And your voice is the heat of the night/I'm on fire.")
And then a question from her jerks our man back to now. They are already in New Mexico, so she asks him; "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.” After all, they are "free to wander," and it's just across the border.
The next bit of the conversation is muddled, at least for me. This is how I have always heard it go:
She: "Why don't we... wake up down in Mexico?"
He: "I don't know nothin' about no Mexico. And tell me why won’t you love me for who I am, where I am?”
She: “'Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
To me, this makes sense. She says, let's go. He says, I don't want to, "AND" [emphasis mine, as it seems to indicate a further thought by the same speaker] why do we need to keep moving, anyway-- love me here! She says, that's just the way I am. Take it or leave it, sorry.
Now, according to both Simon's website and the liner notes on the original LP, it goes like this:
She: "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.”
He: Oh, I don’t know nothin’ about, nothin’ no Mexico.
She: “And tell me, why won’t you love me for who I am where I am?” [Why is she asking this? She's the one that wants to love him somewhere else! Namely, Mexico! He does want to love her where they are, and not go to Mexico.]
He said: “Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
(The words "He said" are on both the site and the notes; the quotes are as depicted at the site.)
So you see my problem with this. The difference in the reading is critical. It goes to the whole point of who was not accepting, who is inflexible. In my reading, she wants to go and he wants to stop; he asks her why they keep moving and she says "just 'cause."
In the official reading, she both suggests they go and then demands to know why they should go. Which I hold makes no sense. And if she is making no sense, why does he accept the blame for being inflexible about going when she is the one who wanted to go?! Instead of saying, "But you were the one who wanted to go!"
Anyway, they break up. They "returned to their natural coasts." If this were about Simon and Fisher (which it does not seem to be), he would go back to New York and she would head back to LA. In any case, they "resume old acquaintances" and date other people. Again, if this were about the couple people think it is, the line "speculate who had been damaged the most" would refer to her novels and his songs, each of which are at least semi-autobiographical and mention the other.
The line "easy time will determine if these consolations"-- their friends, dating, and artistic pursuits-- "will be their reward" reminds me of line in a Shawn Colvin song, about what her friends say after each breakup: "At least you got a song out of it."
And is it over? No. The "arc" that began in rainbows and peaked in sensuous lovemaking is now a broken bridge "waiting to be restored."
And now, on the last leg of this song's journey, we learn what the title and refrain are about: "You take two bodies and you twirl them into one/Their hearts and their bones/And they won’t come undone." The idea of "hearts" being an image of love is popular enough... but Simon adds "bones."
"Bone of my bone," Adam calls Eve, and indeed she is made of his bone. "I feel it in my bones," is a deeper, more intuitive sense than "I know it in my heart." Under all of the "flesh and blood," the very core of your physical being is bone. (How bad is George Thorogood? "Bad to the bone.")
It's not just "hearts" and emotions here. It's physicality and bones that are intermingled, and inextricably so.
This is one of Simon's prettiest and saddest songs. It is about how each love and loss shapes a person, potentially forever.
"Didn't it work out all right in the end?" Ozymandias asks Dr. Manhattan in the graphic novel The Watchmen. "End?" the supernatural superhero replies. "Nothing ever ends."
IMPACT:
The song did not chart, but the album did make the top 100 in the US and throughout Europe, and even Japan and Australia. It reached #3 in Norway, the Top 20 in Sweden, The Netherlands, and France, and the Top 40 in Switzerland, Japan, the UK, and the US.
Next Song: When Numbers Get Serious
So, while it is tempting to say that the song is about this couple and the dissolution of their marriage, Simon wrote it before they were married and released it before they were divorced. So it's about some other couple, or an imaginary one. Either that, or Simon predicted the ending of the marriage before he even proposed.
The opening line certainly lends itself to the speculation that the subjects are Simon and Fisher. Simon is Jewish; Fisher is Jewish on her father's side, which some count as only being "half Jewish," since Judaism is traditionally a matrilineal (passed down through the mother's side) religion.
The couple, whomever they are, are "free to wander wherever they choose" (which may be a riff on the idea of the "wandering Jew," and perhaps even the idea of the Jews being "the chosen people.") But then, during a trip to New Mexico, they choose differently from one another. (The Latinate guitars and drums of the region are heard throughout the song.)
It is significant that they are in the Sangre de Christo mountains. As the song itself explains, the range is named for the blood of Jesus, the ultimate martyr. Someone here feels that they are sacrificing themselves.
The journey is supposed to be ending; it's on its "last leg." The "arc" of their relationship is compared to a "rainbow," which is both beautiful and illusory. They are "high" in the mountains, where the air is thin and hallucinations are possible. Also, while there must have been rain for there to be rainbows, the area is a "desert" and bereft of the practical needs to sustain life. "Mountain passes," or pre-cut trails, are also becoming "stone," and more difficult to navigate. As pretty as things appear superficially, they are in fact bad and getting worse.
Then the man begins to wonder when the trouble started. He recalls a wedding that was somewhat scandalous-- "The act was outrageous"-- and the bride may have gone through with the wedding even though she was ill. She was "contagious," and she "burned" with a fever.
Either that, or her fervor caused his girlfriend, with whom he is travelling now, to catch the wedding bug: "These events may have had some effect/On the man with the girl by his side." Wait, what was the effect on him? Did her passion stir his, in turn? "His hands rolling down her hair/Love like lightning, shaking till it moans," is a very evocative phrasing (and it's better than what Simon came up with in "How the Heart Approaches": "I roll in your arms/And your voice is the heat of the night/I'm on fire.")
And then a question from her jerks our man back to now. They are already in New Mexico, so she asks him; "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.” After all, they are "free to wander," and it's just across the border.
The next bit of the conversation is muddled, at least for me. This is how I have always heard it go:
She: "Why don't we... wake up down in Mexico?"
He: "I don't know nothin' about no Mexico. And tell me why won’t you love me for who I am, where I am?”
She: “'Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
To me, this makes sense. She says, let's go. He says, I don't want to, "AND" [emphasis mine, as it seems to indicate a further thought by the same speaker] why do we need to keep moving, anyway-- love me here! She says, that's just the way I am. Take it or leave it, sorry.
Now, according to both Simon's website and the liner notes on the original LP, it goes like this:
She: "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.”
He: Oh, I don’t know nothin’ about, nothin’ no Mexico.
She: “And tell me, why won’t you love me for who I am where I am?” [Why is she asking this? She's the one that wants to love him somewhere else! Namely, Mexico! He does want to love her where they are, and not go to Mexico.]
He said: “Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
(The words "He said" are on both the site and the notes; the quotes are as depicted at the site.)
So you see my problem with this. The difference in the reading is critical. It goes to the whole point of who was not accepting, who is inflexible. In my reading, she wants to go and he wants to stop; he asks her why they keep moving and she says "just 'cause."
In the official reading, she both suggests they go and then demands to know why they should go. Which I hold makes no sense. And if she is making no sense, why does he accept the blame for being inflexible about going when she is the one who wanted to go?! Instead of saying, "But you were the one who wanted to go!"
Anyway, they break up. They "returned to their natural coasts." If this were about Simon and Fisher (which it does not seem to be), he would go back to New York and she would head back to LA. In any case, they "resume old acquaintances" and date other people. Again, if this were about the couple people think it is, the line "speculate who had been damaged the most" would refer to her novels and his songs, each of which are at least semi-autobiographical and mention the other.
The line "easy time will determine if these consolations"-- their friends, dating, and artistic pursuits-- "will be their reward" reminds me of line in a Shawn Colvin song, about what her friends say after each breakup: "At least you got a song out of it."
And is it over? No. The "arc" that began in rainbows and peaked in sensuous lovemaking is now a broken bridge "waiting to be restored."
And now, on the last leg of this song's journey, we learn what the title and refrain are about: "You take two bodies and you twirl them into one/Their hearts and their bones/And they won’t come undone." The idea of "hearts" being an image of love is popular enough... but Simon adds "bones."
"Bone of my bone," Adam calls Eve, and indeed she is made of his bone. "I feel it in my bones," is a deeper, more intuitive sense than "I know it in my heart." Under all of the "flesh and blood," the very core of your physical being is bone. (How bad is George Thorogood? "Bad to the bone.")
It's not just "hearts" and emotions here. It's physicality and bones that are intermingled, and inextricably so.
This is one of Simon's prettiest and saddest songs. It is about how each love and loss shapes a person, potentially forever.
"Didn't it work out all right in the end?" Ozymandias asks Dr. Manhattan in the graphic novel The Watchmen. "End?" the supernatural superhero replies. "Nothing ever ends."
IMPACT:
The song did not chart, but the album did make the top 100 in the US and throughout Europe, and even Japan and Australia. It reached #3 in Norway, the Top 20 in Sweden, The Netherlands, and France, and the Top 40 in Switzerland, Japan, the UK, and the US.
Next Song: When Numbers Get Serious
Hearts and Bones
Before we get into the song, it is important to note some dates. The song was copyrighted 1982, and the album on which it appeared was released in 1983. Paul Simon married his second wife, actor/author Carrie Fisher, in 1983, and they divorced in 1984, one month shy of their first anniversary. (True, they had dated since 1977, but still.)
So, while it is tempting to say that the song is about this couple and the dissolution of their marriage, Simon wrote it before they were married and released it before they were divorced. So it's about some other couple, or an imaginary one. Either that, or Simon predicted the ending of the marriage before he even proposed.
The opening line certainly lends itself to the speculation that the subjects are Simon and Fisher. Simon is Jewish; Fisher is Jewish on her father's side, which some count as only being "half Jewish," since Judaism is traditionally a matrilineal (passed down through the mother's side) religion.
The couple, whomever they are, are "free to wander wherever they choose" (which may be a riff on the idea of the "wandering Jew," and perhaps even the idea of the Jews being "the chosen people.") But then, during a trip to New Mexico, they choose differently from one another. (The Latinate guitars and drums of the region are heard throughout the song.)
It is significant that they are in the Sangre de Christo mountains. As the song itself explains, the range is named for the blood of Jesus, the ultimate martyr. Someone here feels that they are sacrificing themselves.
The journey is supposed to be ending; it's on its "last leg." The "arc" of their relationship is compared to a "rainbow," which is both beautiful and illusory. They are "high" in the mountains, where the air is thin and hallucinations are possible. Also, while there must have been rain for there to be rainbows, the area is a "desert" and bereft of the practical needs to sustain life. "Mountain passes," or pre-cut trails, are also becoming "stone," and more difficult to navigate. As pretty as things appear superficially, they are in fact bad and getting worse.
Then the man begins to wonder when the trouble started. He recalls a wedding that was somewhat scandalous-- "The act was outrageous"-- and the bride may have gone through with the wedding even though she was ill. She was "contagious," and she "burned" with a fever.
Either that, or her fervor caused his girlfriend, with whom he is travelling now, to catch the wedding bug: "These events may have had some effect/ On the man with the girl by his side." Wait, what was the effect on him? Did her passion stir his, in turn? "His hands rolling down her hair/ Love like lightning, shaking till it moans," is a very evocative phrasing (and it's better than what Simon came up with in "How the Heart Approaches": "I roll in your arms/ And your voice is the heat of the night/ I'm on fire.")
And then a question from her jerks our man back to now. They are already in New Mexico, so she asks him; "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.” After all, they are "free to wander," and Mexico is just across the border.
The next bit of the conversation is muddled, at least for me. This is how I have always heard it go:
She: "Why don't we... wake up down in Mexico?"
He: "I don't know nothin' about no Mexico. And tell me why won’t you love me for who I am, where I am?”
She: “'Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
To me, this makes sense. She says, let's go. He says, I don't want to, "AND" [emphasis mine, as it seems to indicate a further thought by the same speaker] why do we need to keep moving, anyway-- love me here! She says, that's just the way I am. Take it or leave it, sorry.
Now, according to both Simon's website and the liner notes on the original LP, it goes like this:
She: "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.”
He: Oh, I don’t know nothin’ about, nothin’ no Mexico.
She: “And tell me, why won’t you love me for who I am where I am?” [Why is she asking this? She's the one that wants to love him somewhere else! Namely, Mexico! He does want to love her where they are... and not go to Mexico.]
He said: “Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
(The words "He said" are on both the site and the notes; the quotes are as depicted at the site.)
So you see my problem with this. The difference in the reading is critical. It goes to the whole point of who was not accepting, who is inflexible. In my reading, she wants to go and he wants to stop; he asks her why they keep moving and she says "just 'cause."
In the official reading, she both suggests they go and then demands to know why they should go. Which I hold makes no sense. And if she is making no sense (as people sometimes do), why does he accept the blame for being inflexible about going when she is the one who wanted to go?! Instead of saying, "But you were the one who wanted to go!"
Anyway, they break up. They "returned to their natural coasts." If this were about Simon and Fisher (which it does not seem to be), he would go back to New York and she would head back to LA. In any case, they "resume old acquaintances" and date other people. Again, if this were about the couple people think it is, the line "speculate who had been damaged the most" would refer to her novels and his songs, each of which are at least semi-autobiographical and mention the other.
The line "easy time will determine if these consolations"-- their friends, dating, and artistic pursuits-- "will be their reward" reminds me of line in a Shawn Colvin song, about what her friends say after each breakup: "At least you got a song out of it."
And is it over? No. The "arc" that began in rainbows and peaked in sensuous lovemaking is now a broken bridge "waiting to be restored."
And now, on the last leg of this song's journey, we learn what the title and refrain are about: "You take two bodies and you twirl them into one/ Their hearts and their bones/ And they won’t come undone." The idea of "hearts" being an image of love is popular enough... but Simon adds "bones."
"Bone of my bone," Adam calls Eve, and indeed she is made of his bone. "I feel it in my bones," is a deeper, more intuitive sense than "I know it in my heart." Under all of the "flesh and blood," the very core of your physical being is bone. (How bad is George Thorogood? "Bad to the bone.")
It's not just "hearts" and emotions here. It's physicality and bones that are intermingled, and inextricably so.
This is one of Simon's prettiest and saddest songs. It is about how each love and loss shapes a person, potentially forever.
"Didn't it work out all right in the end?" Ozymandias asks Dr. Manhattan in the graphic novel The Watchmen. "End?" he supernatural superhero replies, "Nothing ever ends."
IMPACT:
The song did not chart, but the album did make the top 100 in the US and throughout Europe, and even Japan and Australia. It reached #3 in Norway, the Top 20 in Sweden, The Netherlands, and France, and the Top 40 in Switzerland, Japan, the UK, and the US.
Next Song: When Numbers Get Serious
So, while it is tempting to say that the song is about this couple and the dissolution of their marriage, Simon wrote it before they were married and released it before they were divorced. So it's about some other couple, or an imaginary one. Either that, or Simon predicted the ending of the marriage before he even proposed.
The opening line certainly lends itself to the speculation that the subjects are Simon and Fisher. Simon is Jewish; Fisher is Jewish on her father's side, which some count as only being "half Jewish," since Judaism is traditionally a matrilineal (passed down through the mother's side) religion.
The couple, whomever they are, are "free to wander wherever they choose" (which may be a riff on the idea of the "wandering Jew," and perhaps even the idea of the Jews being "the chosen people.") But then, during a trip to New Mexico, they choose differently from one another. (The Latinate guitars and drums of the region are heard throughout the song.)
It is significant that they are in the Sangre de Christo mountains. As the song itself explains, the range is named for the blood of Jesus, the ultimate martyr. Someone here feels that they are sacrificing themselves.
The journey is supposed to be ending; it's on its "last leg." The "arc" of their relationship is compared to a "rainbow," which is both beautiful and illusory. They are "high" in the mountains, where the air is thin and hallucinations are possible. Also, while there must have been rain for there to be rainbows, the area is a "desert" and bereft of the practical needs to sustain life. "Mountain passes," or pre-cut trails, are also becoming "stone," and more difficult to navigate. As pretty as things appear superficially, they are in fact bad and getting worse.
Then the man begins to wonder when the trouble started. He recalls a wedding that was somewhat scandalous-- "The act was outrageous"-- and the bride may have gone through with the wedding even though she was ill. She was "contagious," and she "burned" with a fever.
Either that, or her fervor caused his girlfriend, with whom he is travelling now, to catch the wedding bug: "These events may have had some effect/ On the man with the girl by his side." Wait, what was the effect on him? Did her passion stir his, in turn? "His hands rolling down her hair/ Love like lightning, shaking till it moans," is a very evocative phrasing (and it's better than what Simon came up with in "How the Heart Approaches": "I roll in your arms/ And your voice is the heat of the night/ I'm on fire.")
And then a question from her jerks our man back to now. They are already in New Mexico, so she asks him; "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.” After all, they are "free to wander," and Mexico is just across the border.
The next bit of the conversation is muddled, at least for me. This is how I have always heard it go:
She: "Why don't we... wake up down in Mexico?"
He: "I don't know nothin' about no Mexico. And tell me why won’t you love me for who I am, where I am?”
She: “'Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
To me, this makes sense. She says, let's go. He says, I don't want to, "AND" [emphasis mine, as it seems to indicate a further thought by the same speaker] why do we need to keep moving, anyway-- love me here! She says, that's just the way I am. Take it or leave it, sorry.
Now, according to both Simon's website and the liner notes on the original LP, it goes like this:
She: "Why don’t we drive through the night? We’ll wake up down in Mexico.”
He: Oh, I don’t know nothin’ about, nothin’ no Mexico.
She: “And tell me, why won’t you love me for who I am where I am?” [Why is she asking this? She's the one that wants to love him somewhere else! Namely, Mexico! He does want to love her where they are... and not go to Mexico.]
He said: “Cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. This is how I love you, baby."
(The words "He said" are on both the site and the notes; the quotes are as depicted at the site.)
So you see my problem with this. The difference in the reading is critical. It goes to the whole point of who was not accepting, who is inflexible. In my reading, she wants to go and he wants to stop; he asks her why they keep moving and she says "just 'cause."
In the official reading, she both suggests they go and then demands to know why they should go. Which I hold makes no sense. And if she is making no sense (as people sometimes do), why does he accept the blame for being inflexible about going when she is the one who wanted to go?! Instead of saying, "But you were the one who wanted to go!"
Anyway, they break up. They "returned to their natural coasts." If this were about Simon and Fisher (which it does not seem to be), he would go back to New York and she would head back to LA. In any case, they "resume old acquaintances" and date other people. Again, if this were about the couple people think it is, the line "speculate who had been damaged the most" would refer to her novels and his songs, each of which are at least semi-autobiographical and mention the other.
The line "easy time will determine if these consolations"-- their friends, dating, and artistic pursuits-- "will be their reward" reminds me of line in a Shawn Colvin song, about what her friends say after each breakup: "At least you got a song out of it."
And is it over? No. The "arc" that began in rainbows and peaked in sensuous lovemaking is now a broken bridge "waiting to be restored."
And now, on the last leg of this song's journey, we learn what the title and refrain are about: "You take two bodies and you twirl them into one/ Their hearts and their bones/ And they won’t come undone." The idea of "hearts" being an image of love is popular enough... but Simon adds "bones."
"Bone of my bone," Adam calls Eve, and indeed she is made of his bone. "I feel it in my bones," is a deeper, more intuitive sense than "I know it in my heart." Under all of the "flesh and blood," the very core of your physical being is bone. (How bad is George Thorogood? "Bad to the bone.")
It's not just "hearts" and emotions here. It's physicality and bones that are intermingled, and inextricably so.
This is one of Simon's prettiest and saddest songs. It is about how each love and loss shapes a person, potentially forever.
"Didn't it work out all right in the end?" Ozymandias asks Dr. Manhattan in the graphic novel The Watchmen. "End?" he supernatural superhero replies, "Nothing ever ends."
IMPACT:
The song did not chart, but the album did make the top 100 in the US and throughout Europe, and even Japan and Australia. It reached #3 in Norway, the Top 20 in Sweden, The Netherlands, and France, and the Top 40 in Switzerland, Japan, the UK, and the US.
Next Song: When Numbers Get Serious
Monday, September 26, 2011
Groundhog
This track is both obscure and highly pedigreed. It appears on a solo album by Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul and Mary) titled That's Enough for Me. Members of The Band play on the track as well.
"Livin’ a hobo’s life’s not the/ Glamour that it seems/ It’s a drag at the end of the day." This sentiment seems to run counter to the many other Simon songs in which he complains about feeling overworked and wishes for a more leisurely pace.
The first lines are slightly off: "Ask the groundhog/ Diggin’ for a hole." Why is he digging to find a hole? Doesn't he create a hole by the act of digging itself? Why digging "for" a hole, and not just "diggin' a hole," or if he needed another beat, "diggin' him a hole"? In any case, the industrious groundhog is contrasted with "the dog who’s gone astray," and presumably is not digging for a bone.
As for the speaker, "I’m diggin’ down/ Beneath my pride," and is about to reveal something deeply personal below his surface: "I get the blues all morning/ Morning is my best time of the day." This could mean two things: One, he enjoys being miserable; or two, his merely bluesy mornings are nothing compared with how abjectly depressed he gets as the day wears on.
The next line refers to yet another animal, a racehorse: "Stanley Dancer took my money/ Call it an off night at the track." Wait, it gets worse-- it wasn't his money to begin with: "Give me that one sweet chance/ To salvage our romance/ And I’ll pay every cent of it back."
This is a terrible negotiator. He takes her money and loses it at the track. Rather than say, "If I pay it back, will you give our love another chance?" his ploy is "If you take me back, then I'll pay you back." At this point, Stanley Dancer is a better bet.
If our speaker knows that "the hobo's life" isn't worth living, it must be from experience. He's certainly tried it.
He's not done trying to win her back. His next move is the old "Only you can save me! How can you not?" routine: "Pull my life-line...Open your heart... Now that I need a helping hand/ Would you take your baby home."
OK, let's follow his logic: He needs a "helping hand" because he's broke. He's broke because he owes her money. He owes her money because he stole her money and gambled it away. Is she supposed to forget that part?
Well, yeah! "Touch my loyalties," he pleads, "Honey don’t treat your man this way." As if he was the one done wrong by her breaking up with him, as if his "loyalties" have been to her... and not to Stanley Dancer, the no-trick pony.
There is an old Jewish joke about the definition of the word "chutzpah": Imagine a man who kills his parents, then begs the court for mercy because he's an orphan.
Now, this guy didn't kill anybody, but the groundhog is not the one here digging himself in deeper.
Musical Note: This song was left off of the Bridge album.
Next Song: Allergies
"Livin’ a hobo’s life’s not the/ Glamour that it seems/ It’s a drag at the end of the day." This sentiment seems to run counter to the many other Simon songs in which he complains about feeling overworked and wishes for a more leisurely pace.
The first lines are slightly off: "Ask the groundhog/ Diggin’ for a hole." Why is he digging to find a hole? Doesn't he create a hole by the act of digging itself? Why digging "for" a hole, and not just "diggin' a hole," or if he needed another beat, "diggin' him a hole"? In any case, the industrious groundhog is contrasted with "the dog who’s gone astray," and presumably is not digging for a bone.
As for the speaker, "I’m diggin’ down/ Beneath my pride," and is about to reveal something deeply personal below his surface: "I get the blues all morning/ Morning is my best time of the day." This could mean two things: One, he enjoys being miserable; or two, his merely bluesy mornings are nothing compared with how abjectly depressed he gets as the day wears on.
The next line refers to yet another animal, a racehorse: "Stanley Dancer took my money/ Call it an off night at the track." Wait, it gets worse-- it wasn't his money to begin with: "Give me that one sweet chance/ To salvage our romance/ And I’ll pay every cent of it back."
This is a terrible negotiator. He takes her money and loses it at the track. Rather than say, "If I pay it back, will you give our love another chance?" his ploy is "If you take me back, then I'll pay you back." At this point, Stanley Dancer is a better bet.
If our speaker knows that "the hobo's life" isn't worth living, it must be from experience. He's certainly tried it.
He's not done trying to win her back. His next move is the old "Only you can save me! How can you not?" routine: "Pull my life-line...Open your heart... Now that I need a helping hand/ Would you take your baby home."
OK, let's follow his logic: He needs a "helping hand" because he's broke. He's broke because he owes her money. He owes her money because he stole her money and gambled it away. Is she supposed to forget that part?
Well, yeah! "Touch my loyalties," he pleads, "Honey don’t treat your man this way." As if he was the one done wrong by her breaking up with him, as if his "loyalties" have been to her... and not to Stanley Dancer, the no-trick pony.
There is an old Jewish joke about the definition of the word "chutzpah": Imagine a man who kills his parents, then begs the court for mercy because he's an orphan.
Now, this guy didn't kill anybody, but the groundhog is not the one here digging himself in deeper.
Musical Note: This song was left off of the Bridge album.
Next Song: Allergies
Monday, August 29, 2011
All Because of You
As the first musical notes indicate, this is the early version of the song that became "Oh, Marion." It even contains the idea of love being an "easy game" for others. In the original incarnation, the line read: "...another lover/ Is an easy game."
Simon begins with an idea recycled from "Run that Body Down": "I went to my doctor." While the doctor might be able to help with a heartburn or even a heart attack, he cannot help with what the speaker has, which is heartbreak: "It’s all because of you/ It’s all because of you wouldn't say 'I do.'"
The doctor is no help, so he tries the drugstore. Or perhaps, the "drugstore," because one does not generally ask a pharmacist "Do the drugs on me," but a pusher. Again, this health-care provider demurs.
"Ain’t nobody loves me/ Nobody needs my love," our lovelorn speaker laments. Not only is he not the recipient of love, no one wants to be the recipient of his. Of course, the only one he knows this for certain about is the woman who would not accept his marriage proposal. Also, it could be that other women are steering clear of someone so clearly "on the rebound."
Then Simon comes up with a line he will use later: "This my only life." This is a cosmopolitan, existential disavowal of reincarnation/resurrection, which rather than comforting him with its enlightenment leads to a sense of mortality and despair. It shows up again as a line in "The Coast" on Rhythm of the Saints as "This is the only life" (and the variant "This is a lonely life.")
Frustrated with Western medicine, our despondent speaker turns to "alternative" or "traditional" cures: "So I went to the gypsy woman." While the word "Gypsy" is today considered offensive (and perhaps always was) and the preferred term is Rroma, the image of the kerchief-topped crone bending over a crystal ball is common in rock music, from "Madame Ruth/ The Gypsy with the gold-capped tooth" in "Love Potion #9" (originally by The Clovers) to Springsteen's line in "Sandy": "Well, the cops finally busted Madame Marie/ For telling fortunes better than they do."
The psychic admits, "I ain’t got no potions and no special kind of weed," but at least has some useful advice: "Go away, take a weekend or two." Staying where he is, brooding on the breakup, is not working, so perhaps a change of scene is in order.
The bridge explains why our Romeo is so beside himself, why his "brain’s all messed up." It's bad enough that his lover would not say "I do" and seems to have either rejected his marriage proposal or, worse, left him at the altar. But she won't break up with him, either: "...you would not say we’re through."
Although one has to wonder why the marriage rejection is not seen, in and of itself, as a break-up.
Perhaps Simon realized this and decided on a thorough rewrite of the song. He saved the medical metaphors in "Oh, Marion," writing about a "heart that beats on the opposite side," and a even reference to "brains," although it now means "intelligence" instead of "emotional state." Rather than being a song about a man who is troubled by a vexing woman-- a common song subject-- it is now about being a vexing man, who at least appreciates that he might be difficult to tolerate. A much more uncommon subject, indeed.
Next song: Stranded in a Limosine
Simon begins with an idea recycled from "Run that Body Down": "I went to my doctor." While the doctor might be able to help with a heartburn or even a heart attack, he cannot help with what the speaker has, which is heartbreak: "It’s all because of you/ It’s all because of you wouldn't say 'I do.'"
The doctor is no help, so he tries the drugstore. Or perhaps, the "drugstore," because one does not generally ask a pharmacist "Do the drugs on me," but a pusher. Again, this health-care provider demurs.
"Ain’t nobody loves me/ Nobody needs my love," our lovelorn speaker laments. Not only is he not the recipient of love, no one wants to be the recipient of his. Of course, the only one he knows this for certain about is the woman who would not accept his marriage proposal. Also, it could be that other women are steering clear of someone so clearly "on the rebound."
Then Simon comes up with a line he will use later: "This my only life." This is a cosmopolitan, existential disavowal of reincarnation/resurrection, which rather than comforting him with its enlightenment leads to a sense of mortality and despair. It shows up again as a line in "The Coast" on Rhythm of the Saints as "This is the only life" (and the variant "This is a lonely life.")
Frustrated with Western medicine, our despondent speaker turns to "alternative" or "traditional" cures: "So I went to the gypsy woman." While the word "Gypsy" is today considered offensive (and perhaps always was) and the preferred term is Rroma, the image of the kerchief-topped crone bending over a crystal ball is common in rock music, from "Madame Ruth/ The Gypsy with the gold-capped tooth" in "Love Potion #9" (originally by The Clovers) to Springsteen's line in "Sandy": "Well, the cops finally busted Madame Marie/ For telling fortunes better than they do."
The psychic admits, "I ain’t got no potions and no special kind of weed," but at least has some useful advice: "Go away, take a weekend or two." Staying where he is, brooding on the breakup, is not working, so perhaps a change of scene is in order.
The bridge explains why our Romeo is so beside himself, why his "brain’s all messed up." It's bad enough that his lover would not say "I do" and seems to have either rejected his marriage proposal or, worse, left him at the altar. But she won't break up with him, either: "...you would not say we’re through."
Although one has to wonder why the marriage rejection is not seen, in and of itself, as a break-up.
Perhaps Simon realized this and decided on a thorough rewrite of the song. He saved the medical metaphors in "Oh, Marion," writing about a "heart that beats on the opposite side," and a even reference to "brains," although it now means "intelligence" instead of "emotional state." Rather than being a song about a man who is troubled by a vexing woman-- a common song subject-- it is now about being a vexing man, who at least appreciates that he might be difficult to tolerate. A much more uncommon subject, indeed.
Next song: Stranded in a Limosine
Monday, July 4, 2011
Oh, Marion
In the previous song, it is unclear who the "bone-weary traveler" is. Is it the speaker, or someone the speaker sees from his motel window and identifies with?
Here, the pronoun shifts again. In the verses, the speaker refers to a "he," some confounding person. In the verses, the song has a man speaking in first person ("I think") to his lover, Marion.
We're going to have to assume that the "he" of the verses and the "I" of the chorus are the same person, otherwise what holds the two together? The "I" becomes "he"... when other people are discussing him.
The first verse opens with a line one might hear from a teacher about a distracted student: "The boy’s got brains/ He just refuse to use ’em and that’s all." The boy’s response is a version of "ignorance is bliss": “The more I get to thinking, the less I tend to laugh.” Simon revisits this idea in the twin songs "Think to Much" on his next album.
(In a moment of lyrical weakness or laziness, Simon ends the first verse with a new rhyme-- "brains/abstains," then gives up on that couplet idea for the second and third verses.)
In the second verse, his heart beats on his right instead of his left. This is no longer just a frustrating choice that beleaguers a teacher, it is something for a scientific journal: "a strange phenomenon/ The laws of nature denied." His response this time was that it was an adaptation make in reaction to some unnamed threat: "I shifted my heart for its safety’s sake.”
He refuses to use his mind, his heart's desires are dubious, and then he employs his nice singing "voice" to be duplicitous: "his words don’t connect to his eyes."
His response is hard to parse: "when I sing/ I can hear the truth auditioning.” An "audition" is an attempt to be heard, a prelude to being allowed to act or sing before an audience. So if the truth is "auditioning," at least he is trying to convey the meaning and emotion of the song.
So here is our man, according to those who know him-- purposefully unthinking, guarded in love, and prone to hiding his feelings.
Are we all that surprised that his relationship with Marion is "in trouble"? The true surprise is that he is in a relationship altogether.
He would rather "laugh" than "think." He hides his heart. He sings (to quote "Kathy's Song) songs he "can't believe." His entire life is lived as if he wants all of his experiences to be happening to someone else. In short, he is in massive, willful denial.
So of course he doesn't "believe" Marion at first when she says that their relationship is "in trouble." He doesn't want to think about it, he never allowed himself to get that close to her... and, like all insincere people, he cannot appreciate sincerity when he hears it.
What's his assessment? That love is a "game." (Which idea stands in direct contradiction to that of the speaker of "Congratulations," who says "love is not a game.") It is predictable that a shallow person such as this would be dismissive of love.
He also concludes that the game is "easy" for "other people." Once again, he externalizes his problems. Love is just a game he is not good at, like chess.
Suddenly, something is his problem. Something real, and really bad, is happening, and it is happening to him and not someone else. Well then, at least it's no one's fault (including his own). And of course there is nothing he could do about it anyway.
"Oh, Marion," we have to say, "How did you get mixed up with this guy in the first place?"
Next Song: Ace in the Hole
Here, the pronoun shifts again. In the verses, the speaker refers to a "he," some confounding person. In the verses, the song has a man speaking in first person ("I think") to his lover, Marion.
We're going to have to assume that the "he" of the verses and the "I" of the chorus are the same person, otherwise what holds the two together? The "I" becomes "he"... when other people are discussing him.
The first verse opens with a line one might hear from a teacher about a distracted student: "The boy’s got brains/ He just refuse to use ’em and that’s all." The boy’s response is a version of "ignorance is bliss": “The more I get to thinking, the less I tend to laugh.” Simon revisits this idea in the twin songs "Think to Much" on his next album.
(In a moment of lyrical weakness or laziness, Simon ends the first verse with a new rhyme-- "brains/abstains," then gives up on that couplet idea for the second and third verses.)
In the second verse, his heart beats on his right instead of his left. This is no longer just a frustrating choice that beleaguers a teacher, it is something for a scientific journal: "a strange phenomenon/ The laws of nature denied." His response this time was that it was an adaptation make in reaction to some unnamed threat: "I shifted my heart for its safety’s sake.”
He refuses to use his mind, his heart's desires are dubious, and then he employs his nice singing "voice" to be duplicitous: "his words don’t connect to his eyes."
His response is hard to parse: "when I sing/ I can hear the truth auditioning.” An "audition" is an attempt to be heard, a prelude to being allowed to act or sing before an audience. So if the truth is "auditioning," at least he is trying to convey the meaning and emotion of the song.
So here is our man, according to those who know him-- purposefully unthinking, guarded in love, and prone to hiding his feelings.
Are we all that surprised that his relationship with Marion is "in trouble"? The true surprise is that he is in a relationship altogether.
He would rather "laugh" than "think." He hides his heart. He sings (to quote "Kathy's Song) songs he "can't believe." His entire life is lived as if he wants all of his experiences to be happening to someone else. In short, he is in massive, willful denial.
So of course he doesn't "believe" Marion at first when she says that their relationship is "in trouble." He doesn't want to think about it, he never allowed himself to get that close to her... and, like all insincere people, he cannot appreciate sincerity when he hears it.
What's his assessment? That love is a "game." (Which idea stands in direct contradiction to that of the speaker of "Congratulations," who says "love is not a game.") It is predictable that a shallow person such as this would be dismissive of love.
He also concludes that the game is "easy" for "other people." Once again, he externalizes his problems. Love is just a game he is not good at, like chess.
Suddenly, something is his problem. Something real, and really bad, is happening, and it is happening to him and not someone else. Well then, at least it's no one's fault (including his own). And of course there is nothing he could do about it anyway.
"Oh, Marion," we have to say, "How did you get mixed up with this guy in the first place?"
Next Song: Ace in the Hole
Sunday, April 17, 2011
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
One question often asked of songwriters is: "Where do you get your ideas for songs?"
Sometimes, it is something a child says or does. For instance, one of John Lennon's sons showed him a drawing he'd made of "Lucy in the sky with diamonds."
In the case of this song, Simon was explaining to his son what rhymes are, illustrating by rhyming words with names.
The structure of the song is interesting. It is one side of a conversation, reported by the other person. If the song were the dialogue of a play, the woman would be speaking 90% of the words.
The man has asked her, evidently, for advice. Or, perhaps she asked him what was wrong, and responded to his answer. In any case, he seems to be in a bad relationship and wants out... but is unsure of how to effect an exit.
She reframes his question: "The problem is all inside your head." And her advice bears this out-- all of her proposals involve leaving without a farewell: "Slip out the back... hop on the bus... drop off the key." No talking things to a close, no therapy sessions, not even a note. Just leaving.
It sounds like the other person involved-- the one being left-- deserves no better, or perhaps wants it to be over but is also not able to initiate a breakup. In fact, the one being left might be grateful if he'd simply vanish instead of dragging things out by talking about their feelings. Regardless, the advisor implies that the issue of propriety or sensitivity is all his own: "The problem is all inside your head" [emphasis mine].
What is interesting is that the man would seek the advice of a woman in this case. And one he does not seem to be heading toward. In other words, it does not seems to be the case that he is leaving his relationship to start one with his advisor. She is too offhanded and uninterested.
Further. it is unlikely that this is his therapist, bartender, or co-worker, for at the end of the conversation she kisses him. More likely, is a female friend, perhaps a sister or cousin, who would give him a kiss goodnight.
Again, we might assume the advice "You think too much, man-- just leave," to come from a man. It is surprising that a woman would advise his insensitivity toward another woman, which is what makes me think that she is more familiar with the particulars of his case.
Another interesting thing about the adviser is her sudden change in tone. In the verses, she uses words like "logically," "furthermore," "intrude" and "misconstrued" (an amazing rhyme, incidentally). She uses locutions like "it grieves me so." Then, in the chorus, she switches tone and becomes more colloquial and clipped: "Don't need to discuss much." It is almost as if she is mocking his over-intellectualization of the situation. Her basic message: You're complicating things, dude. Just scram.
For all of her protestations of help, when he asks her straight out, "Would you please explain...?" she shuts him down, with "Why don't we just sleep on it?" Once again, he is trying to analyze something that requires no analysis. If he can't understand "Just slip out the back, Jack," then there is nothing more she is willing to say that night.
After all, even the five of the "50 ways" she lists all amount to the same thing: Just. Leave. Now.
The solution is not always difficult or painful. Sometimes, "the answer is easy."
IMPACT:
Like "Still Crazy," the title of this song has entered the popular lexicon. No doubt part if its popularity can be attributed to Gadd's military-style drumming and the catchy chorus.
The backup singers themselves were sort of a supergroup, consisting of Phoebe Snow (famous for the song "Poetry Man), Valerie Simpson of the duo Ashford and Simpson, and R&B/jazz singer Patti Austin.
The song went to #1 in the US, where it stayed for three weeks, and also topped the charts in Canada. It went to #2 in France, and brushed the top 20 in the UK. The song went gold and remained a top seller for nearly half a year.
The song has been covered by acts as different as The Drifters and Miley Cyrus, and an outfit with no self-esteem issues called G. Love and Special Sauce.
Gadd's militaristic drumbeat opener has been widely sampled by rappers-- twice by Eminem, and also by Tupac, Common, Kool Moe Dee, and even Kid & Play. And also by a band called Pop Will Eat Itself, which is as good a definition as any for what sampling is.
Next Song: Night Game
Sometimes, it is something a child says or does. For instance, one of John Lennon's sons showed him a drawing he'd made of "Lucy in the sky with diamonds."
In the case of this song, Simon was explaining to his son what rhymes are, illustrating by rhyming words with names.
The structure of the song is interesting. It is one side of a conversation, reported by the other person. If the song were the dialogue of a play, the woman would be speaking 90% of the words.
The man has asked her, evidently, for advice. Or, perhaps she asked him what was wrong, and responded to his answer. In any case, he seems to be in a bad relationship and wants out... but is unsure of how to effect an exit.
She reframes his question: "The problem is all inside your head." And her advice bears this out-- all of her proposals involve leaving without a farewell: "Slip out the back... hop on the bus... drop off the key." No talking things to a close, no therapy sessions, not even a note. Just leaving.
It sounds like the other person involved-- the one being left-- deserves no better, or perhaps wants it to be over but is also not able to initiate a breakup. In fact, the one being left might be grateful if he'd simply vanish instead of dragging things out by talking about their feelings. Regardless, the advisor implies that the issue of propriety or sensitivity is all his own: "The problem is all inside your head" [emphasis mine].
What is interesting is that the man would seek the advice of a woman in this case. And one he does not seem to be heading toward. In other words, it does not seems to be the case that he is leaving his relationship to start one with his advisor. She is too offhanded and uninterested.
Further. it is unlikely that this is his therapist, bartender, or co-worker, for at the end of the conversation she kisses him. More likely, is a female friend, perhaps a sister or cousin, who would give him a kiss goodnight.
Again, we might assume the advice "You think too much, man-- just leave," to come from a man. It is surprising that a woman would advise his insensitivity toward another woman, which is what makes me think that she is more familiar with the particulars of his case.
Another interesting thing about the adviser is her sudden change in tone. In the verses, she uses words like "logically," "furthermore," "intrude" and "misconstrued" (an amazing rhyme, incidentally). She uses locutions like "it grieves me so." Then, in the chorus, she switches tone and becomes more colloquial and clipped: "Don't need to discuss much." It is almost as if she is mocking his over-intellectualization of the situation. Her basic message: You're complicating things, dude. Just scram.
For all of her protestations of help, when he asks her straight out, "Would you please explain...?" she shuts him down, with "Why don't we just sleep on it?" Once again, he is trying to analyze something that requires no analysis. If he can't understand "Just slip out the back, Jack," then there is nothing more she is willing to say that night.
After all, even the five of the "50 ways" she lists all amount to the same thing: Just. Leave. Now.
The solution is not always difficult or painful. Sometimes, "the answer is easy."
IMPACT:
Like "Still Crazy," the title of this song has entered the popular lexicon. No doubt part if its popularity can be attributed to Gadd's military-style drumming and the catchy chorus.
The backup singers themselves were sort of a supergroup, consisting of Phoebe Snow (famous for the song "Poetry Man), Valerie Simpson of the duo Ashford and Simpson, and R&B/jazz singer Patti Austin.
The song went to #1 in the US, where it stayed for three weeks, and also topped the charts in Canada. It went to #2 in France, and brushed the top 20 in the UK. The song went gold and remained a top seller for nearly half a year.
The song has been covered by acts as different as The Drifters and Miley Cyrus, and an outfit with no self-esteem issues called G. Love and Special Sauce.
Gadd's militaristic drumbeat opener has been widely sampled by rappers-- twice by Eminem, and also by Tupac, Common, Kool Moe Dee, and even Kid & Play. And also by a band called Pop Will Eat Itself, which is as good a definition as any for what sampling is.
Next Song: Night Game
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Red Rubber Ball
Simon co-wrote this song, but he does not seem to have recorded a solo version. Then again, neither did S&G... except on a concert CD that was released many years post-breakup.
Since there is an S&G recording of the song, and since Simon co-wrote the song pre-breakup, let's call this an "S&G-era song," if not an "S&G song" proper.
While the previously discussed track recalls Simon's 1960's style protest work, this number hearkens back even further, to his Brill Building, "Hey Schoolgirl" days.
The lyrics, as befitting that time and place, are straightforward, if somewhat clever. The main imagery is childlike: a "roller-coaster," a "starfish," and the titular red ball.
But there is a sophistication in the message. Yes, there is some residual anger in this breakup song, but nothing like the venom of "Interest" or the petulance of "I Am a Rock."
Breakups can be like other losses, and move through the five basic emotions of grieving outlined by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (she never intended for people to think that these had to be felt "in order," though, or even one at a time): Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
So if those other songs have a speaker stuck in Anger mode, the speaker of "Rubber Ball" is largely in a state of Acceptance: "I think it's gonna be all right/ Yeah, the worst is over now/ The morning sun is shining."
Yes, but why "like a red rubber ball"? Well, anything from childhood can be seen as a sign of hope.
One could read a sense of resiliency, of "bouncing back" from a let-down, into the fact that the ball is rubber.
That might be pushing things. After all, Bobby Vee's "Rubber Ball" uses the same image to refer to an overly pliant boy who can't get over a girl: "Like a rubber ball, I come bouncing back to you."
Instead, let's look at Simon's song as he uses Anger as a lever to move himself into a place of Acceptance. As the speaker looks back over the relationship-- the song itself starts with "I should have known"-- he lists the reasons that he is relieved the relationship's sun has set:
She was dismissive of, perhaps even loose with, his "secrets"... she treated him like 'arm candy,' as they say today... and she never had "time" for him. Overall, he felt uncared for, and uncared about: "You never cared... never caring."
Whatever good times there were do not seem to have been worth the anguish the relationship caused. Simon uses the somewhat cliche image of a "roller-coaster ride" to illustrate these ups-and-downs...
...then tries to extend the metaphor-- "I bought my ticket with my tears." Rather than smirk at the histrionics of that line, let us realize that this was at least an attempt to elevate a cliche, and that it is entirely in keeping with what passed for poetry in song lyrics of its era (again compare to the Bobby Vee song). Lastly, even if someone was trying to write a song in the voice of a wounded teen today, they might very well write that line; it is entirely in character.
Lastly, let us applaud the speaker for personal strength of the rest of the line: "...that's all I'm gonna spend." No Bargaining going on here, no "If only you'd..." or "I promise to..." The speaker has cried enough, and is done.
In case he was unclear, the speaker states his case plainly in other lines: "I don't need you at all... If I never hear your name again, it's all the same to me."
He realizes he's worth more than the sort of treatment he's been getting... and after all, she's not the only fish in the sea.
Not even the only "starfish."
IMPACT:
The song was made famous by a band called The Cyrkle, who opened for The Beatles in the US and spelled their name like that because John Lennon told them to.
The song rose to #2, and "went gold," which means it sold over a million copies. It was co-written by The Seekers' Bruce Woodley.
Also, after I selected it last week for this week's post, I heard it blasting from a car stereo here in Chicago on a fall weekend afternoon.
Next Song: Hey Schoolgirl
Since there is an S&G recording of the song, and since Simon co-wrote the song pre-breakup, let's call this an "S&G-era song," if not an "S&G song" proper.
While the previously discussed track recalls Simon's 1960's style protest work, this number hearkens back even further, to his Brill Building, "Hey Schoolgirl" days.
The lyrics, as befitting that time and place, are straightforward, if somewhat clever. The main imagery is childlike: a "roller-coaster," a "starfish," and the titular red ball.
But there is a sophistication in the message. Yes, there is some residual anger in this breakup song, but nothing like the venom of "Interest" or the petulance of "I Am a Rock."
Breakups can be like other losses, and move through the five basic emotions of grieving outlined by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (she never intended for people to think that these had to be felt "in order," though, or even one at a time): Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
So if those other songs have a speaker stuck in Anger mode, the speaker of "Rubber Ball" is largely in a state of Acceptance: "I think it's gonna be all right/ Yeah, the worst is over now/ The morning sun is shining."
Yes, but why "like a red rubber ball"? Well, anything from childhood can be seen as a sign of hope.
One could read a sense of resiliency, of "bouncing back" from a let-down, into the fact that the ball is rubber.
That might be pushing things. After all, Bobby Vee's "Rubber Ball" uses the same image to refer to an overly pliant boy who can't get over a girl: "Like a rubber ball, I come bouncing back to you."
Instead, let's look at Simon's song as he uses Anger as a lever to move himself into a place of Acceptance. As the speaker looks back over the relationship-- the song itself starts with "I should have known"-- he lists the reasons that he is relieved the relationship's sun has set:
She was dismissive of, perhaps even loose with, his "secrets"... she treated him like 'arm candy,' as they say today... and she never had "time" for him. Overall, he felt uncared for, and uncared about: "You never cared... never caring."
Whatever good times there were do not seem to have been worth the anguish the relationship caused. Simon uses the somewhat cliche image of a "roller-coaster ride" to illustrate these ups-and-downs...
...then tries to extend the metaphor-- "I bought my ticket with my tears." Rather than smirk at the histrionics of that line, let us realize that this was at least an attempt to elevate a cliche, and that it is entirely in keeping with what passed for poetry in song lyrics of its era (again compare to the Bobby Vee song). Lastly, even if someone was trying to write a song in the voice of a wounded teen today, they might very well write that line; it is entirely in character.
Lastly, let us applaud the speaker for personal strength of the rest of the line: "...that's all I'm gonna spend." No Bargaining going on here, no "If only you'd..." or "I promise to..." The speaker has cried enough, and is done.
In case he was unclear, the speaker states his case plainly in other lines: "I don't need you at all... If I never hear your name again, it's all the same to me."
He realizes he's worth more than the sort of treatment he's been getting... and after all, she's not the only fish in the sea.
Not even the only "starfish."
IMPACT:
The song was made famous by a band called The Cyrkle, who opened for The Beatles in the US and spelled their name like that because John Lennon told them to.
The song rose to #2, and "went gold," which means it sold over a million copies. It was co-written by The Seekers' Bruce Woodley.
Also, after I selected it last week for this week's post, I heard it blasting from a car stereo here in Chicago on a fall weekend afternoon.
Next Song: Hey Schoolgirl
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