Full Force Galesburg
download here
K: So I think one cool way to think of Full Force is that it's all stories of the same couples in different forms, species and incarnations. Hence the Hindu-ish cover art. And animal songs like "Masher" and "Snow Owl."
S: If what you say is true, then the line "On the day that I forget you, I hope my heart explodes" from "Twin Human Highway Flares" has new meaning, since the speaker will inevitably forget with each subsequent death (when the heart stops) and rebirth. Are there any common threads running through the songs that would hint that these are the same people in different circumstances? Also, does this mean that the line "It's you, it's you, it's you" on "Original Air-Blue Gown" is saying that one of them is actually incarnated as "the young Cassius Clay"? Oh, why not.
In any case, if a single couple wants to visit all the places mentioned on your average Mountain Goats album, it would take several lifetimes for sure. There are a lot of lines that suggest dimly remembered better days. Hard to tell whether that's the typical Alpha Couple feeling of nostalgia and regret, or shadows of literal former lives.
I think animals in general come up more than on other albums. As symbols, more than imagery for its own sake; quasi-religious symbols, even, if you want to run with the Hindu thing. Dogs in Galesburg, etc.
It seems like we should address the title. Come to find out "Full Force Gale" is a Van Morrison song, so that's cute.
K: It's very true about the animals, and I wouldn't put it past John Darnielle as a songwriter to be so referential as to up his anthropomorphic animal content to further some sort of Hindu thing. I mean, you've heard the man talk. The presence of some god I'm too lazy to look up on the album art makes the suggestion of themes of eternal cycles of life and death and that these particular set of beings have been circling each other over and over forever, constantly surrounded by faint wisps of memory from this constant traveling, but never getting to that destination. There's constant allusions to a sort of content feeling of dread, or contented anticipation of doom. The two of them have been bouncing off of each other for all time like some sort of pendulums with paths that transect. In "Original Air-Blue Gown," I imagine one of the two in old age following the others death watching "the young Cassius Clay" and almost chuckling at catching the other in a forgotten lifetime.
But I definitely do not want to run this conversation strictly along such "Dude, think about it! Pink Floyd is TOTALLY about the Wizard of Oz" type lines. So feel free to take the ball and run in another direction.
(I like the John Madden vibe this is taking)
But,consider the text from the back of the album:
"Small red potatoes in the rich black soil. Green young trees sucking up the river water. Oranges from Spain. Rain-chute running down the side of the trailer. Islands. Paper mills all the way out in Roaring Springs, Pennsylvania. New banjo from Nashville. calandar from De Smet and Van Diest showing April on the wall, all wrong. Heading North though France for days, but never getting out. Old barn, strange sounds. Gin. Sunlight. Almost broke my own heart down there in Vicksburg. There is always an anchor somewhere. All that was left later was the vision of the two of us crossing the parking lot toward the blazing room off the interstate half an hour past Iowa over on the other side of the Mississippi. These songs are about what made that moment either possible or inevitable, depending on how you look at it."S: Your theory reminds me of Vanilla Sky when she says, "I'll tell you in another life, when we are both cats." But I'd take any song from this album over that movie.
I want to decode the usage of wind: various songs mention "wind whistling" , "wind in your hair", "hot wind coming off the water", "floating down the slight breeze". The wind comes from somewhere or does something. It's active and effectual. Unlike the characters, it isn't tied down by geography. Maybe it binds all these separate places and in so doing gives them some higher importance. That Van Morrison song says, "Like a full force gale I was lifted up again by the Lord." It's like how the Holy Spirit descends on people as a "rushing mighty wind" in Acts.
As for the text on the back, that all-important moment in the parking lot is pretty clearly the subject of "Twin Human Highway Flares." What the fuck happened at that motel?
K: In regards to the omnipresent wind, perhaps it is like the constant cycling of life, or something to that effect? I think you're dead on with your note that wind is one of the few things one really encounters that isn't attached to a geographical place in any way. But, the wind still goes through them, and then goes elsewhere. I think your Van Morrison find pretty much proves that something like that was intended by the artist.
In "Twin Human Highway Flares"... perhaps everything all came together, and they finally saw themselves as they are and always will be. One of those very few moments in life where you realize, "This is love, and this is literally the most complete and whole as a person I will probably ever feel in my life, before it all crashes down."
I think "Twin Human Highway Flares" is the high-water mark as far as the entwined lives described in the album, and that the album ends with their rebirth in Brownsville on the final track. In fact, it's almost implied that one of the souls is complaining, "Damnit, why do we get born here over and over again?" They become individualized to find each other in the next life after "coming apart again." And that's where the album fades out. It's a pretty sentimental notion as far as a concept album, but with JD behind the wheel...Well, of course he executes it expertly and with great poetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment