Okkervil River, the second person and personification
First things first, if you’ve not spent time with Okkervil River’s new record Black Sheep Boy, please, i implore you— Do so. Like right now. It is impossibly beautiful and sad and cruel and good. The production and arrangements are amazing and the songwriting is just so so great.
I’m currently obsessed with two things: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Two and the Okkervil River song A Stone. The song opens with the lines:
Hot breath, rough skin, warm laughs and smiling; the loveliest words, whispered and meant; you like all these things.
I’m all over these lyrics for a couple reasons. Mostly, the perfectly placed ‘you’ in the third line. When Will Sheff sings/insists that i like all these things, i say “I do. I do like all those things”. And frankly, he’s got me right there; if there wasn’t another good line in the song that’d be fine, i’m already convinced (this is perhaps overstating this but imagine if the lyrics were “you like hot breathe, you like rough skin, etc…. it totally wouldn’t work right). Another thing, there’s some kind of consonance or something that lets ‘skin’ rhyme with ‘smiling’ and rhyme with ‘meant’, which is beautiful.
The song unfolds with a enormous extended metaphor about stone. We get this amazing horn section in the middle and then this fairy tale of stone personified. It’s all just so perfectly constructed. The stone makes a tower, the tower holds a queen, a queen has a daughter who is Lovely and stubborn and brave (that word ‘stubborn’ is what makes this my favorite line in the song), the daughter has suitors, and then there’s wonderful moment that probably won’t translate over computer screens but the narrator steps in for a second and there’s too many words in the line and the pacing is awkward and that is why it is perfect:
And i think that i know, the bitter dismay, of a lover who brought fresh bouquets every day. And she turned him away to remember some knave who once gave just one rose, one day, years ago.
And then we get the horns again bless them and we weep our way to the end.
I’m all heady about this stuff ‘cos i was working on a new song this weekend and went back and forth on how to handle a simile about a jacket. The song opens with: “This worn out winter coat, pocket full of ashes, unbuttoned like a question.” And i couldn’t figure out whether a buttoned coat or unbuttoned coat is more like a question. See, buttoned up, it is concealing something, which seems kinda like a question. But the more i thought about it, i realized that the question is the wearer’s… if her eyes are tired and blue and she hasn’t opened the door and if her jacket is long and brown and unbuttoned, she may consider taking it off, and staying.