Really? Crazy… I thought that all her “Neil” references were Gaiman. I know the one in “Tear in Your Hand” is… learn something new every day. 
Nope, not being faceticious at all. I listen to the musicians so much that I often (not always) miss any lyrical meaning in songs.
“Phil and Don” doesn’t refer to the Everly brothers? Interesting.
What about “Martin Luther”?
Can you explain “Mrs. Vanderbilt”, “Jet” or “Junior’s Farm”?
Look, all I know is that when Paul discusses the song in one of the books he said it’s about his family. Auntie Gin is one of the people who helped take care of him when his mum died, etc. If Phil and Don are the Everlys then well, Idon’t want the fuck Macca is on about. But i tend to take his word for things.
elfkin477, is there any way you could cite that or provide a context for the quote?
I only ask because Tori has mentioned Neil Gaiman in at least two other songs, Tear In Your Hand and Horses.
Is it possible that in that interview she was talking about Greg, who is mentioned in Pretty Good Year (which, like Space Dog, is on her Under The Pink CD)?
I always wondered what I Want It That Way was about. “I never wanna hear you say/I want it that way…”
Sounds misogynistic to me.
“Clocks,” by Coldplay, is a gorgeous song…but I can’t figure out what it means.
I nominate Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” I get the impression with “Desolation Row” that Dylan is singing about real people he knew, but weirded up their descriptions in the song to disguise their identities. As for “Stuck Inside of Mobile,” I just don’t know. I guess he was on drugs when he wrote that and the bizarre lyrics don’t refer to anything in reality. (Except for the “Texas medicine” [i.e. marijuana] which obviously put him in the frame of mind in which he wrote the song).
I’d like to hear an interpretation of that Uncle Kraker song that doesn’t involve a creepy abuser/stalker. I don’t see how that song can be so popular, it gives me the heebie jeebies.
Texas Medicine? I doubt Bob’s referring to pot there. He rareley, if ever did, with the exception of Rainy day women, which really wasn’t about pot, either… Booze, on the other hand…
Sometimes you can decipher Bob’s songs, but you have to think outside the box, so to speak. You also have to rely on the atmosphere and sound and feeling that the song creates to figure it out. But you can never know. i once argued that off that same record, BoB, the song “Sooner or Later” actually logically made sense, if you understand the lyrics as coming from three different voices, or points of view, at different times of the episode described in the song, but my bob friends all laughed at me. So you never know. But he wasn’t pulling this stuff out of thin air, either. “Rolling Stone” makes complete sense when you realize the woman he’s referring to is Bob Himself.
Anyway
Just a theory, but perhaps the “grapefruit winning” line is a reference to the Simpson’s Lord of the Flies episode.
You mean the one “follow me, everything is all right” etc…?
I always thought it was about a guy who was having an affair with a married woman.
I liked the old San Francisco power-pop band Jellyfish, but…talk about obscure lyrics. Even when you start to think you know what one of their songs is about, they’ve thrown in so many tangents and bad puns that you’re lost anyway. Case in point: “Sebrina, Paste and Plato” starts off about a stupid kid in preschool (“Chauncey’s looking dapper in his brand-new dunce cap”) being infatuated with his classmate Sebrina, but manages to end in a drunken haze (“Shepherdess of the muscatel”). In between they “confuse” Play-Doh and Plato, invent words (“Lovertarian”), and seem to suggest that the dessert is “singing.” No wonder they seem to be beloved of English majors.
Bob Dylan often throws me also. I still love to listen to SIOMWTMBA.
Jimmy Hendrix “The Wind cries Mary” sort of confuses me. My kids ask why the traffic lights never turn blue here.
Actually it’s mostly about David and Bathsheba. Although he’s conflating them with S and D in that line.
Jet was his dog.
Thanks, that makes sense, tlw.
Any takers for Big Me?
Couldn’t be. That episode of the Simpsons (entitled “Das Bus”) first aired in February of 1998. Space Dog is from Tori’s album Under the Pink, released in 1994.
Ah,Jellyfish. I loved their Bellybutton CD. So many lines to choose from. How about, from That Is Why:
It’s partly cloudy with trouser stains
And his copy of inquiring minds
But that never meant that much to her
She chose to keep her nose too clean
She’d rather keep them pointed, anyway
In the spine of a magazine
I’ve always been stumped by “I Started a Joke” by the Bee Gees. It seems like it could almost be about a lot of things. Always confused me.
I have a history of being very dense at song meanings, so be nice.
I’ve always been confused by The Freshman by the Verve Pipe. I know something tragic happened, but what? The best I can come up with was maybe a teen mom killed her infant and then herself, but where does the “compromise” come in, what’s the “shoe full of rice,” and why such guilt in extremis on the part of the narrator? What “sin” is he dying for?