How My Band’s New Album Unlocked My Ipod’s Hidden Powers

First things first, here’s our first “official” (meaning, on Bandcamp) release, Best of Year One: http://trialofthegoldenwitch.bandcamp.com/album/best-of-year-one

This is a collection of the 22 most listenable songs that my band has recorded in the past year. I think it’s quite a fun and cool collection. I’d have released it for free, but Bandcamp won’t let me—not that it matters, since who wants this shit on their computer(?), and also the streaming is the same quality you’ll get for downloading.

Nonetheless, I actually bought the damn thing, because I wanted to put it on my ipod and was too lazy to hunt down/convert all the songs to mp3s. And through doing this, I discovered a new function on my ipod touch!

See, when I uploaded the songs, I filled in their lyrics, which you can see on the individual pages of the songs. Unexpectedly, when you play one of these songs on an ipod touch, it shows the lyrics on screen while the songs is playing, and you can scroll through them and it’s pretty awesome.

I don’t know how to even put lyrics on a regular mp3, and clearly it’s not a normal practice to write lyrics to song files, since I’ve never seen this before. I gotta say it’s pretty fucking cool!

Brilliant Dear Hunter Song Title

As singer-songwriter Casey Crescenzo put it, he’s a fan of “immature puns,” and The Dear Hunter is full of them, with the band name most notably being a play on the film The Deer Hunter. 

The Dear Hunter albums tell a story of one man’s life from birth to death, and the various characters in his story are referred to with titles such as Ms. Terri (his mother) and Ms. Leading (a prostitute he falls in love with during the second album.) There are more puns in the song titles, but this one is truly god-level. 

One two-part song on the second album is called The Bitter Suite. Obviously a pun on ‘bittersweet,’ its part in the story is where the main character first meets Ms. Leading in what seems to be a brothel (the lyrics are rather cryptic) and bangs her. It seemed to me like the purpose of the title was that the part was taking place *in* a suite, and the whole idea of banging a prostitute is pretty ‘bittersweet’ itself.

But there’s more! The song, which, when put together, is 13 minutes long, is divided into 3 sections (the first 2 sections comprise the first track, and section 3 is the second track.) Each section of the song has a different musical style than the others. In other words, the song itself is constructed as a musical suite. Brilliant! 

Connecting the Dots as They Appear

I had one of those moments today where I thought back on something from the past and realized how it impacted me later on. In this case, I realized a potential link to why I’m such a canon-fag when it comes to interpreting works.

Back when I was 14/15, I got big into music for the first time. The first band to grab me by the balls and make me realize how amazing music could be was The Mars Volta, specifically their Frances the Mute album.

If you’ve heard of The Mars Volta, you probably know about their lyrics, which are known for being ‘out-there.’ Vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala uses obtuse and seemingly meaningless language and some have accused him of writing lyrics by opening up a dictionary to random pages and picking out cool-sounding words.

Some samples of their most famous lines include:

“Transient jet lag, ecto mime bison! These are the haunts of roulette dares, ruse of Metacarpi, caveat emptor to all who enter here.” - Roulette Dares (The Haunt of) from De-Loused in the Comatorium

“The ocean floor is hidden from your viewing lens—a depth-perception languished in the night. All of my life I’ve been sewing these wounds but the seeds sprout a lacrymal cloud.” - Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus from Frances the Mute

“The kiosk in my temporal lobe is shaped like Rosalynn Carter, and she says my map is home again, but torn facedown. I’ve only but a million blemishes to tell you all about.” - Tetragrammaton from Amputechture

When I got into TMV, I started visiting a forum wherein people were trying to interpret the lyrics and would share their thoughts.

The thing about The Mars Volta is that their lyrics definitely mean something, but that meaning is nigh implacable. Their first album, De-Loused in the Comatorium, was more-or-less a retelling of a short story by Cedric (easily findable online) which is absolutely batshit insane and awesome. Reading the lyrics, there’s no way that one could get the short story out of it unless they manged to replicate the exact acid trip that probably inspired it.

However, that wouldn’t stop anyone from trying, especially because not only did Frances the Mute have a hell of a lot more lyrics than it’s predecessor, but there were hints as to the meaning of it all.

I read a *lot* of lyrical interpretations, and found a lot of them to be pretty hard to believe. Knowing me, especially how I used to be, I’m sure you can imagine the authoritative approach I took to the lyrics; if they didn’t line up with what I thought was correct, then they probably weren’t true. I stuck with the meanings that meant the most to me and seemed the most practical, and took those as the meanings of the songs.

Some of it’s pretty great. For instance, the aforementioned lyric from Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus could be interpreted like this:

It’s known that Frances the Mute was inspired by the diary of a man who was an orphan and was trying to learn more about his parents, especially the father that he never met, and was doing whatever he could to research them.

So, the opening line “the ocean floor is hidden from your viewing lens” - the ocean floor is considered to be the place where life began on earth, so this could mean ‘your beginning is hidden from your sight.’ “A depth perception languished in the night” follows suit, basically meaning ‘your vision of things is obscured in darkness.’ “All of my life I’ve been sewing these wounds, but the seeds sprout a lacrymal cloud” - first, lacrymal means tears, so it’s a cloud of tears. Knowing that, this line is pretty obvious.

And next, the line from Tetragrammaton:

The song is usually interpreted to be about the way Christianity was forced on peoples all over the globe. This train of thought is what allows the interpretation make perfect sense. According to what I read, First Lady Rosalynn Carter once worked as an envoy to Latin America, and tried to essentially tell them that they could be acknowledged by the United States again if they adhered to elements of our culture. Considering that The Mars Volta are Mexicans (from Texas), and have sung about Latin-American themes before, it’s not surprising they’d talk about this sort of thing.

“The kiosk in my temporal lobe is shaped like Rosalynn Carter” - the temporal lobe is the part of the brain that controls personality. The idea is that Carter was trying to make the singer into someone like herself. “She says my map is home again, but torn facedown” - ‘map’ refers to the country, ‘torn facedown’ means that they have to remove their identity to be acknowledged. Finally, “I’ve only but a million blemishes to tell you all about” implies a rejection of Carter’s offer, and pride in the person’s own ‘face.’

So you see, there’s gold to be found in mining these lyrics, and having those interpretations and images makes them a lot more powerful.

But once again, consider that in my youth, I wasn’t willing to accept that different people have their own interpretations which are all valid, and the meanings that I accepted became what I considered the writer’s intent. Through this, I formed a sort of obsession with reading into things to figure out exactly what the creator wanted to show me.

This carried into anime as an obsession with canon. I’ve never been able to inflict my own imagination on a story. I can’t make characters fall in love with characters that I don’t think they canonically should, nor can I make a them do something out-of-character. It’s not to say that I don’t play with the characters I see in anime - I’ve got a habit of imagining how the course of a character’s life will unfold as time moves on. If things are left largely open with only some hints as to where things will go, then I’m probably going to make that character a lesbian. (See my epic interpretation of Konata and Kagami’s relationship.)

Over time, however, I’ve begun to lighten up on canon-faggotry to some extent—especially because a lot of creators don’t want people to adhere to one definition. I know that the Mars Volta in particular would hate it if someone tried to pin down one meaning to their lyrics. Cedric would call them an unimaginative jackass and probably advise they stop listening to his music lol. Another band I love with very vague lyrics is Coheed and Cambria, whose lyrics simultaneously tell an epic sci-fi story and contain Claudio Sanchez’s personal emotions, and he said himself that he tries to write his songs to be as much relatable as they are storytelling (his success in this is debatable, lol.)

It’s hard to imagine myself leaving things so open. I hate to be misunderstood. I’m not great at leaving things open-ended. I can be subtle, but I also want you to understand the point. When it comes to my novel, there’s all sorts of subtleties, but if you don’t ultimately get what I want you to get, then I won’t feel like I accomplished much.

I hate when my friends who aren’t particularly analytical watch anime like Lain or Eva or read the Boogiepop novels and tell me that they ‘get it’, but the most that they can say about it is that ‘it was awesome’, and I have a hard time believing that the story means half as much to them as it does to me. Even just something like the fact that a friend I loaned Black Lagoon to adored the show, but watched it dubbed, makes me feel like I didn’t actually watch the same show.

But I’m getting better on a personal level. While it’s still hard for me to accept interpretations that I strongly disagree with, I’ve gotten better about letting things take on a meaning to me that’s of my choosing.

The way I write lyrics has changed. I used to write them where I tried to use as strange a phrasing as possible, but my meaning was abundantly clear. Now, I’ve taken to writing things that only I would be able to see my own intent in, and everyone else can make up their own meaning. Because ultimately, what does it matter to me what other people get out of it? If it makes them happy, let them have it. It’s not like they can take away or invalidate my own interpretation.

A Stupid Question About a Morbidly Depressing Smiths Song

This Night Has Opened My Eyes might be my favorite Smiths song. It’s how I found out about them, anyway - I was listening to my At the Drive-In ‘best of’ album (This Station is Non-Operational) with my mom, and their cover of the song came on. I hadn’t even realized it was a cover, but my mom revealed to me that it was a song by The Smiths. “The band that sang Girlfriend in a Coma” - only song I’d heard before. Of course, it turned out that my mom had been this massive diehard Smiths fan who followed them back when they were around, but I digress.

All of The Smiths’ songs are depressing, but this one is probably the most serious of them. It seems to be about a women who got knocked up by some jerk and, when left to take care of the baby, she got rid of it (I can’t seem to tell if she killed it, as the lyrics seem to imply that the child lost it’s possibilities, or if she in fact ‘dumped her on a doorstep’). The lyrics sort of recount the issue with no decisive stance on it - it is what it is, and it’s heavy. “I’m not happy and I’m not sad” is a brilliant way that it’s put. 

But there’s one line that gets me. It’s right after “The dream is gone but the baby is real - oh, you did a good thing.” The line in question: “She could have been a poet or she could have been a fool - oh, you did a bad thing.”

I have to ask, of all things, why a poet and a fool? Were they the first two things that came to mind? Or were they the only options? In the world of Morissey’s brain and the Smiths’ general style, I wouldn’t be surprised if he really meant to say that there are only poets and fools in this world as flipsides of some coin; but assuming that isn’t the case, why those two seemingly unrelated things? It flows nicely enough I guess, but it just feels so very random. ?

Realizing The Meaning Of A Line Years Later

Either because I was young or unknowledgeable before, or just because I hadn’t given it enough thought yet, I sometimes find myself realizing the meaning of a line in a song or a story years after first hearing or reading it.

A huge example for me came recently when I was listening to November Has Come by Gorillaz. I’ve loved the Demon Dayz album for years now, and it’s one of my favorite and most played/sung albums, but the lyrics to most of the songs make next to no sense. The first verse of November Has Come is one of the least comprehensible, and supposedly it came about when the rapper just tried to see how many rhymes he could lace together in a single minute - I believe it. But here’s a line that caught my attention recently (note that no Gorillaz lyrics are official, this is just from experience)

“that blanks the raw that dank sure stank lit, sank past the pit for more hardcore prank spit”

The line as a whole still makes no sense, but the phrase “that dank sure stank lit” certainly has meaning. For those who don’t know, ‘dank’ is stoner slang for really good weed. Obviously, the dank stank when they lit it up to smoke it. I wouldn’t have known this until my stoner roommates crash coursed me in cannabis culture terminology, and I was quite surprised when I suddenly recognized the line.

This next line caught my attention just yesterday. It’s a song by The Delgados, from their Hate album - another one of my favorite albums wherein the lyrics are all extremely cryptic. I was listening to the song ‘All Rise’ which I’ve sort of gathered is a song about a guy who was less than great throughout his life, and seems to be dying during the song or something - it’s really hard to say much about, but here’s the chorus:

“I’m not sure if I’m in or I’m out - I have hope now where I keep her doubt - but if I had confessions, I’d have concessions - I had to win at all costs… so it ends”

The phrase that got my attention was ‘if I had confessions, I’d have concessions’ - I’d never given it much thought before, but i think what the singer is getting across is that he’s done so much exciting/terrible shit in his life that if he were to confess it all, he could sell tickets to listeners. Clever line, playing off of an analogy(hyperbole?) without actually using it.

The last example I have is actually from my favorite novel, Boogiepop and Others. In chapter 2, near the beginning, the kids in Suema Kazuko’s class are gossiping about Nagi “Fire Witch” Kirima (nicknamed after a King Crimson song by the author) and the mysteries surrounding. Leading up to the moment, the girls were asking Kazuko about what kind of person would be a killer, because she is obsessed with criminal psychology. As Kazuko expects, when she details a killer, the girls all mention Nagi.

“Hmm, well, she’s not normal, that’s for sure.”

“Not normal? The Fire Witch is six kinds of crazy!”

“She’s skipped two days since the new term started. Wonder if she’ll even bother tomorrow…”

“She might as well not. Even when she does come, she causes trouble the moment she steps through the gates and gets herself sent right back home.”

“Kya ha ha! Sounds like her!”

“So far as killing goes, I hear she actually is.”

“How so?”

“You know, one slip and you miss your period…”

“Ah!”

“Then she gets herself suspended before anyone notices and takes care of it…”

“I believe it!”

^Okay, this one is a bit more obvious, but it still took my dumb ass until like my ninth read-through to realize what they meant about the ‘killing’. The implication is that Nagi’s been getting pregnant, then getting herself suspended to go get an abortion. Once again, very clever and excellent dialog, giving you the point (if you have a brain, unlike me) without spelling it out.

Ever had this experience?