Daily Rec Double Dose: Decemberists week [daily rec]
If you haven’t been keeping up with Decemberists week so far, here’s some linkage for you:
Shiny
We Both Go Down Together
I Was Meant For the Stage
Crane Wife 1 & 2
On the Bus Mall
And for what it’s worth, I applaud LD for even trying to tackle “On the Bus Mall”…I still don’t think I understand my thoughts on that song. If you think we’ve missed any, screw you. We’re trying to take some non-obvious ones, though it’s arguable whether there are ANY obvious ones (except for one I can think of, that may or may not come up later this week). Or y’know, “The Tain,” which neither me nor LD wanted any piece of. But I’m rambling, b/c I have a meaty task in front of me. Today’s rec is:
The Engine Driver
It’s arguably the best song on Picaresque, and probably one of the best examples of Meloy’s ability to tell a story about telling a story (was this the one you were thinking of Dave?), “The Engine Driver” can take on many meanings depending on how you look at it. On the surface, it’s a song about three men, all working men (an engine driver, a lineman, and a money lender) who are bound by jobs that involve a mundane existence. There’s some question as to how affluent the “money lender” is, his reference to “I have fortunes upon fortunes” could be referencing the fact that he deals with other people’s money, though I suppose it can be taken in a different way. But each man, a man of inconsequential existence, suffers from an unrequited love, as the refrain:
And if you don’t love me, let me go…
Repeats through the song, linking the characters together. Fair enough, but when the entire chorus unfurls, it shows Meloy’s purpose behind the track:
And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I’ve written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones
At this point, it’s highly subjective what you take away from this song. In my opinion, I’d say that the song is about Meloy, or the songwriter, playing this common emotion of unrequited love through the guise of three different characters in different life situations. All of them are working to forget about what pains them the most, and yet all of them have jobs that are grinding, plodding, boring. Once the release of that pain is achieved, what are these men left with? Empty lives, meaningless jobs, an existence that though painless, is unexciting and listless.
Moving back from the page, you could even look at it from the perspective that the writer of the song is using these characters that he’s created as a way to show himself that the pain of loving someone who’s utterly unavailable is not wholly a bad thing, and that pain is not always unwanted. Because the songwriter, like these men, writes to forget her, and yet once that’s gone, so is the reason to create the song. And let’s face it, a song as gorgeous as this? That would be a shame.
That’s exactly the song I was thinking of.
I’ve never delved too deeply into the meaning behind the engine driver, lineman, and moneylender, aside from the fact that they’re attempts at writing disparate characters. I think this is really only about one “real” person - the guy who finally pipes up on the chorus in a moment of seemingly rare honesty.
I initially took it for granted that he was channeling some sort of romantic frustration about a woman into his work. But now I’m pretty sure that “you” doesn’t refer to a person. It could be his muse, or, perhaps, even the specific characters in the story. He’s afflicted with his own creativity, doomed to spend his life trying to get it down on paper.
This might also resolve a seeming contradiction in the chorus. If he were addressing this to a romantic interest, it wouldn’t make much sense to acknowledge that he’s the heart that she calls home in one line, then a few lines later, admit that he’s trying to rid her from his bones (or, in the refrain, ask - possibly through one of his characters - that she let him go). But if he’s addressing something internal, it fits together pretty smoothly.
Dammit, y’know. I totally forgot to include a paragraph about how it could be his creative process. ahh! I blame work, but yeah, that’s a huge part of the song too. That it’s not the writer’s LOVER, necessarily, just the pain of not being able to fully realize something you love.
And I still find it hilarious that I wasn’t meaning to give clues, and you still guessed the damn song.
I specifically didn’t choose this song, because E and I discussed it one day, and the way he broke down the harmonies amazed me.
But, I too think that the “love” is the creative process. Specifically, I feel like a lot of art is born out of internal turmoil, and this guy is try to write that pain out of his body/mind/whatever. It’s the implication of trying to rid it from his bones that leads me to believe that, whatever it is that moves him to write, it’s nothing pleasant.
I think the anthropomorphization of whatever creative impulse he’s following is really interesting, and lends some credence to Dave’s idea of the muse.
If you wanted to be overly cute (like, say, some of the people I’ve seen discussing Watchmen recently), you could probably make this song about the narrator’s split personalities driving him to try and write them away.