So I've been listening to
Death Cab for Cutie's latest album,
Plans, quite a bit recently. The first few times that I listened to it, I was mostly just going with the melodies and not really paying attention to the words. For me, the music itself has always been more important than the words, so that's how I normally approach listening to a new album. Is the rhythm there? Are the songs well-constructed? Are the melodies catchy? The last thing I check is the actual contents of the lyrics.
So before I started really listening to the lyrics, the album felt very mellow and peaceful. In some places, I felt it was even uplifting, as if the music looked out over bleakness and saw a dawning brighter future in the distance. For example, the first few times I listened to Marching Bands of Manhattan, I thought it sounded like the sensation of waking up early in the morning and walking through the streets of Manhattan with the air fresh and crisp and the sunrise shining on my face. And the funky rhythm of Crooked Teeth made that song sound fun and upbeat. And certainly I Will Follow You into the Dark sounded like a cute little love ballad.
But recently I started listening more carefully to the lyrics on that album, and I realized that it's actually quite a depressing album! I Will Follow You into the Dark is about the certainty of death and how love can help make it less traumatic. What Sarah Said is about watching someone die in a hospital, and wistfully posits that 'Love is watching someone die'. Brothers on a Hotel Bed is about how as a couple grows older they grow apart. I don't recall their other albums being nearly so bleak.
And yet there is such a wonderful poetry that they evoke in their words:
Sorrow drips into your heart
through a pin-hole
Like a faucet that's leaking
and there is comfort in the sound ...
But while you debate
half-empty or half-full
It slowly rises,
your love is going to drown
====================
Cause I built you a
home in my heart
With rotten wood
it decayed from the start
====================
It's truly amazing how poetic the lyrics are. Summer Skin equates the peeling of sunburnt skin with the rebirth of a person, but also with the impossibility of loving someone afterwards because they are no longer the same.
The odd thing is, the sad quality of the lyrics does not diminish the music, but rather enhances it. Somehow the sadness mixes in with the mellowness and uplifting nature of the music to cause a very bittersweet taste. The lyrics by themselves are too bleak, but when added to the music it creates a sense of melancholy, of detachment that goes with the sadness.
This is exactly my idea of a great song - the music should itself be great, but then the lyrics should mesh well with the ideas in the music, and together they should make the song deeper and more meaningful. It's because the lyrics fit so well with the music, that makes almost every song on this album great.
