Lyricist fangirling. Humour me.
Sep. 27th, 2004 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_cat(Someone told me today that I have, and I quote, "a really nice-sounding accent". Aww. Most people, if they comment at all, just ask me where I'm from in a puzzled-sounding way (in their defence, it does jump about a bit) - the man I nearly married thought it was ugly, but he has no taste whatsoever in anything except girlfriends. I mean, I know that my accent is the default one in which everyone should speak the English language, but it's nice to have some outside validation from time to time. Yes.)
The new prettified icon, anyway, has lyrics from a band that everyone should listen to. I try to avoid saying things like that - favourite lyrics tend to be a very personal thing, and what means something to one person won't mean the same to another, and some people just don't like lyrics, and, well, yes. I don't want to be one of those lj people who does nothing but post reams of teeny goth angst in the mistaken conviction everyone else out there will know what they're trying to say, apart from 'I am an angsty goth teenager'. But the Weakerthans have such beautiful lyrics that I feel the need to evangelise a little.
They sing about belonging to a place so much that you love it and hate it at the same time, and loss and loneliness and recovery. Which might make them sound like one of the angsty bands I've just mocked, but they're really not. Their lyrics are perfect enough that I could quote couplets forever ("How I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you / How you don't know where you should look, so you look at my hands"), they sing about pamphleteers rewriting love songs in the language of protest songs and the Communist manifesto, and about one of Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic explorers meeting Michel Foucault, and about playing on baggage carousels in empty airports. And it all works. It's beautiful.
Their first two albums are about loss, more than anything; their third and most recent album is about recovery and rebuilding. But it's not self-pitying angst, and it's the kind of self-consciouss loss and recovery that works, somehow. The song about Foucault and the explorer, who just wants to get back to "dear Antarctica", is a happy poppy thing. The song my icon's lyrics are from is told from the point of view of a bored cat, who's "tired of this piece of string" and wants his miserable, introspective owner to snap out of it. ("I don't know who you're talking to, I've made a search through every room / But all I found was dust that moved in shadows of the afternoon.") It's not wallowing in cynical angst, or an optimistic call to cheerfulness, and I don't think it's anywhere in between either, really. It's off to the side. Look:
When the one-ways collude with the map that you folded wrong,
And the route you abandoned is always the path that you probably should be upon,
When the bottle-cap ashtrays and intimates' ears are all full
With results of your breath, and the threads of your fear are unfurled with the tiniest pull,
One more time, try.
You should listen to them.
The new prettified icon, anyway, has lyrics from a band that everyone should listen to. I try to avoid saying things like that - favourite lyrics tend to be a very personal thing, and what means something to one person won't mean the same to another, and some people just don't like lyrics, and, well, yes. I don't want to be one of those lj people who does nothing but post reams of teeny goth angst in the mistaken conviction everyone else out there will know what they're trying to say, apart from 'I am an angsty goth teenager'. But the Weakerthans have such beautiful lyrics that I feel the need to evangelise a little.
They sing about belonging to a place so much that you love it and hate it at the same time, and loss and loneliness and recovery. Which might make them sound like one of the angsty bands I've just mocked, but they're really not. Their lyrics are perfect enough that I could quote couplets forever ("How I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you / How you don't know where you should look, so you look at my hands"), they sing about pamphleteers rewriting love songs in the language of protest songs and the Communist manifesto, and about one of Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic explorers meeting Michel Foucault, and about playing on baggage carousels in empty airports. And it all works. It's beautiful.
Their first two albums are about loss, more than anything; their third and most recent album is about recovery and rebuilding. But it's not self-pitying angst, and it's the kind of self-consciouss loss and recovery that works, somehow. The song about Foucault and the explorer, who just wants to get back to "dear Antarctica", is a happy poppy thing. The song my icon's lyrics are from is told from the point of view of a bored cat, who's "tired of this piece of string" and wants his miserable, introspective owner to snap out of it. ("I don't know who you're talking to, I've made a search through every room / But all I found was dust that moved in shadows of the afternoon.") It's not wallowing in cynical angst, or an optimistic call to cheerfulness, and I don't think it's anywhere in between either, really. It's off to the side. Look:
When the one-ways collude with the map that you folded wrong,
And the route you abandoned is always the path that you probably should be upon,
When the bottle-cap ashtrays and intimates' ears are all full
With results of your breath, and the threads of your fear are unfurled with the tiniest pull,
One more time, try.
You should listen to them.
