Russell
Peter Pan
Posts: 67
Gender: 
|
One day in the not so distant future, colleges will start offering courses on “Interpreting the
Songs of Patty Griffin”, so I thought I’d toss out a college course type over-analysis of what I
consider to be one of her most fascinating songs.
The thing that caught my attention from the first time I heard the song was the repeated use of the word
“everything”, in particular the contradictory use of the word in the lines:
As far as I can tell, most everything means nothing
Except some things, that mean everything
To me, those lines represent a conflict we are forever trying to resolve. At the beginning of the
song, we have a man on the “way” to “everything”, but by the end the man is conflicted by just
what constitutes “everything”. Since the man has “emptiness” chasing him, it would seem that
reaching “everything” would end the “emptiness”. What better for that than finding a woman
who has a beautiful song? Well, of course, he finds that woman, but he makes a decision:
There's things I'll never tell you til the day I die
Things I done, I can never undo, hiding everything,
That decision creates a distance between the man and the woman - that’s why, after many years,
she’s singing “in the next room”, somewhere apart from him. That’s bad for both - his emptiness
continues to follow him and “it has not been easy for” her. It means “everything” to him to keep
his secrets from her, but that means he never makes it to “everything”. One perceived
“everything” means nothing, while something else means the true “everything”.
Maybe our man should have been brave enough to tell her his secrets. That might have removed
the distance between him and the woman with the beautiful song. After all, it has been said:
Sing me something brave from your mouth
And I'll bring you pearls of water on my hips
And the love in my lips
All the love in my lips
But instead, by not having that bravery, he’ll probably have to look back on his life with thoughts
like this:
I wished I'd have shown you
All of the things
I was on the inside
Well, art is art and is always subject to many varying interpretations and, of course, the good thing
about courses like this: everyone gets an “A”.
|
Pages: 1
Railroad Wings "Help" (Read 5938 times)
