This song has stuck with me for a few years now. It is a song that I listen to maybe every day. It still shocks me, breaks me down, and then wraps itself around me and picks me up again. It speaks to me the way only a few songs do. The lyrics, the tonality, the layers of thought out instrumentation, the gentle close-to-the-mic vocals, almost whispered.
It doesnt modulate, it stays right where it needs to, in a sensitive world of F minor. Interestingly a key I was told by a producer is the lowest you could write a bassline in comfortably without distorting it. Could be myth, but it's nicer to think it isn't when it comes to thoughtful composition. We like to find explainations for beautiful things.
The lyrics are gripping, repetitive, and ambiguous. It is written like a narrative, as if the vocalist is watching a series of events play out to a dark and cinematic end.
It's unfortunate that when we feel a storm,
We can roll ourselves over cause we're uncomfortable
oh when the devil makes us sin,
but we like it when we're spinning in his grin.
These first lines speak of destruction to me. We know conflict is coming and we turn our backs on it. Maybe romantic conflict, maybe some kind of elephant in the room that we are too scared to address. When we make mistakes we relish in them. We like to roll around in them. Pain, despression, fear, we give in to them, and almost get a sadistic pleasure from torturing ourselves with them. I know a lot of people like this, some use it as art, a means to release tension, maybe to make a statement. Others in song, just like this. It is their muse and often their lifeline.
Love is like a sin, my love,
For the one that feels it the most.
Look at her, with her smile like a flame
She will love you like a fly, never love you, again.
It is a Requiem.
A procession to Love's place of rest.
The last section is so strikingly like Chopin's 'Marche Funebre' (Funeral March).
It empties after the final lyrics, and comes in with the most powerful, dark, resonant piano. Strings build, they swoon, they push, forcing the inevitable end. Growing with passionate hate and love, the piano is a driving force, grounding our emotions while the strings tear us apart. All the while a bassline drags us to the depths. The strings rise to a piercing climax and we are left on the periphery of something greater than we ever imagined.
I can't get over the imagery. I will always think it means so many things. For me, I have this strong bond with the words. I feel as if there infront of me is a fragile girl, who maybe herself is not so wise to who she is.
Love is like a sin for those who feel it to the most intensity. It feels like unrequited love, perhaps even rejected love.
Look at her with her smile like a flame.
It reminds me of a book I once read as a little girl called 'The Tulip Touch'. The young girl in it would destroy everything she loved. She had some kind of fire in her that couldn't be put out. She made a friend and the friend tried to give her hope and a new life in a beautiful place, and one day the girl just burnt it all down.
This smile is something sinister and passionate, something embedded deeply.
She will love you like a fly, never love you, again.
When I hear this line, I have the image of an old lantern sitting in the open air, and along comes a fly, drawn to its glowing heat and light, and in that moment of perfection, it reaches the centre and dies in the flame. I feel as if it is a one time love depicted here. Something so engaging. Something that can never be felt or given away the same again.
I also see fear and fragility. It reminds me of a play I read once, 'A Streetcar Named Desire' which I loved greatly. It makes me think of a female character in it called Blanche, who is regularly compared to a pale moth, delicate and swayable. It becomes very surreal towards the end, as Blanche is taken away as she is deemed insane, and she is begging and crying. A tragic woman who had seen too much.
I also see the possibility of a girl deciding she will never give her heart again, or relating to the fly comment, perhaps even someone who is fickle with her emotions.
But with this much passion and intention behind the song, I find myself more drawn to the image of fragile dying love.
A girl who flew too close to the sun, and will never fly again.
If this side were to be taken, it could be drawn that it was in fact her own fire that killed her. She was the little girl Tulip, and she watched her world burn, with a smile on her face.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEgX64n3T7g - youtube of the track
AKC x
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