Day: December 11, 2022

It’s Not Goodbye

On By Katie WIn Music PoetryLeave a comment

The Alexander 23 song “See You Later“, the first track of the album I’m Sorry I Love You released in 2019 is a song of poetry. The song “See You Later” expresses the difficulty of saying goodbye to someone you love, but it does not mean they are gone forever. Through his use of lyrics and first-person perspective, he deepens our understanding of what he feels because he puts us in the experience that he is going through, an experience that we can relate to by listening to the song.

I don’t want to go
But I can’t afford to miss this flight

This is the first line of the first verse. Throughout the whole song, Alexander 23 uses a first-person perspective. Using the first-person perspective allows us as the listeners to be part of the experience that he is going through of having to leave someone he cares for. He follows Perrines’s definition of poetry as Perrine states “Its function is not to tell us about an experience but to allow us to imaginatively participate in it”. He later writes in the chorus,

When we’re both crying
In this broke down elevator

Alexander 23 puts us in the experience that he is going through because we see the emotions that he is feeling and we are experiencing the journey and emotions with him. Not only do we experience it with him, but we feel what he is feeling and we can relate to that feeling.

Furthermore, Alexander 23 uses personification to exemplify the conflict and emotions that he is going through. We can see how is going through a hard time of having to leave the person he loves. Instead of just writing that, he uses what his heart is saying but what his legs are doing to represent the difficulties he is in. He writes;

Yeah, my heart says “Stay”
My legs are walking on their own

Finally, he uses an oxymoron, as he writes in the first verse, he contradicts himself by saying

Sometimes the only way to get over hurt is to hurt

However, by using this we can see that he is in pain and we see the struggles that he is going through. This line represents the meaning of how hard it is to say goodbye to someone but to get over that feeling, you can not push it away, you have to experience it.

Finally, he uses repetition of the line “see you later”. This is also the title of the song, but this line is repeated many times in the song, it emphasizes the meaning of the song, that it is so hard to see someone you love leave, but it doesn’t mean that they are gone forever, you will see them again.

Rivers and Roads

On By Cate RIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

As our time in high school comes to an end and all seniors begin to set eyes on the next chapter of life, The Head and the Heart song “Rivers and Roads” off the album The Head and the Heart, tells a story and displays emotions that many may be feeling at graduation. A somber tone sets the mood for the head singer to tell a story about missing loved ones and doing whatever it takes to see them again. As humans we all crave love; it’s a feeling that gives us purpose and passion. Therefore, when our lives take us in separate directions from those who make us feel that indescribable sense, an emptiness takes over.

A year from now, we’ll all be gone
All our friends will move away
And they’re goin’ to better places
But our friends will be gone away

The opening lines make the theme clear, and to me, it’s all in the in-exact repetition of the second line. A person is coming to the conclusion that a chapter in their life is coming to an end; it may be moving to a different state or going to college. Although this change might be for the best, the simple pleasure of hanging out with friends will no longer be possible and that presents an inevitable tsunami of sadness on the horizon.

Nothin’ is as it has been
And I miss your face like hell

The next two lines display a similar somber tone; however, now it is from a different perspective. The first verse is the speaker thinking about the glooming future and then it switches to the present moment of the speaker having gone through the change and reflecting on what he misses. This POV change is sudden and speeds up the storyline of the song. It also emphasizes how painful the situation is. It wasn’t necessary for the writer to include the first verse but by doing so it deepens the overall sadness. They have already been feeling misery for a year and that probably won’t end any time soon.

Rivers and roads
Rivers and roads
Rivers ’til I reach you

Lastly, these lines are repeated throughout the song. At first glance, one would envision that rivers and roads are very similar. They are in some respects both long and large ways to travel. However, thinking more about it, this analogy is more complex than one may think. A road is a man-made structure meant to get you from point A to point B directly as fast as possible. A river is a naturally winding, sometimes rapid, and sometimes slow body of water that cuts across the world. Notice the writer doesn’t say roads ’til I reach you, he says rivers. Meaning it wouldn’t be a simple trip to rekindle their relationship, it might take years to see their old friends again.

A Song That Will Never Escape Your Mind

On By HANK SIn Memory/Past/History, Music, Music Poetry, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” is an expertly crafted poem that draws you in and refuses to let go. It tells the story of a man’s life, his relationships over the years, and his journey to get back to one person in particular. By the time you’re finished listening to the song, you feel like you’ve lived the speaker’s life right alongside him. The song achieves this effect through its unorthodox usage of perspective and time.

Dylan has a tendency to alter his lyrics in live performances and on different recordings, so there are several different iterations of “Tangled Up in Blue.” The most significant, aside from the album version, is an earlier recording that makes the theme of perspective evident. On the album version, the narrator speaks in the first person in each of the seven stanzas, but in this alternative recording, stanzas one through three and six refer to the same events in the third person, as if the narrator were retelling stories he heard second-hand. This difference in point of view establishes Dylan’s interest in playing with perspective, which is made more evident in the song’s final lines (which are the same in both versions).

But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue

Dylan uses the song’s fairly repetitive structure to sweep the listener up into the flow of time, positioning them in the shoes of the speaker as his memory drifts around from one point in his life to another. Each of the seven stanzas is composed of eight lines that set the scene for whichever stage in his life the speaker is remembering, followed by four lines that resolve that stage, followed by the refrain “Tangled up in blue,” which describes the speaker’s state of being tangled up in his memories.

The stanzas flow together, but they aren’t in chronological order. The first stanza establishes the moment the speaker presently occupies before he starts his walk down memory lane:

Early one morning the sun was shining
I was laying in bed
Wondering if she'd changed at all
If her hair was still red

However, the only lines that are actually in present tense come in the final stanza:

So now I'm going back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now

This frames the stanzas that come between as motivation for the speaker’s current journey. The stories/memories that are told in these stanzas range from moments on one specific night to accounts that condense what could be years of the speaker’s life, but they all make the same argument to the speaker: he must return to the woman he left years ago.

The most poetic stanza of the song is the fifth:

She lit a burner on the stove
And offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You look like the silent type"
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul
From me to you
Tangled up in blue

This verse perfectly encapsulates the meaning of the song (the song is so purposefully crafted that you could make the same argument about any section) by turning a seemingly mundane interaction into a moment of enlightenment that holds great significance in the speaker’s memory. In it, Dylan describes a moment where he was struck by the beauty of a poem in the strikingly beautiful lines of his own poem. He signs the verse “from me to you,” as if he is giving the listener the same gift that the woman gave him in the book of poems.