Thursday, May 2, 2019

Burn It Down



My Apologies to Linkin Park for this song having the same song title as one of their songs. 

This is a song where the main character (see the teeny tiny print at the bottom if you're not familiar with this series of songs) and her friend(s) drink a bunch of beer in the bathroom. Her really good friend (the dude to the right of her in the picture), in his drunken state, decides that it would be a good idea to burn the school down. She's indecisive for a while; but after gettin' drunk enough, herself, she realizes, wait, that is a good idear!

The part that sez, "drinking singing spirits in the can" could be interpreted as: The alcohol that they're drinking is comprised of singing spirits. Or it could be that the "drinking, singing spirits in the can" are the kids, themselves: They're the spirits who are drinking and singing in the bathroom. Or maybe it's both - maybe the alcohol influenced them to sing because the alcohol (often called "spirits") is singing to them. It's like, singing spirits making the drinking spirits sing because they're drinking the singing spirits and every spirit that drinks singing spirits starts to sing. Regardless, I'd imagine those kids would start singing after drinking because intoxicated people like to sing a lot.

Here's last week's song if you turn it around backwards.

The lyrics are:
He said…let’s set the school on fire / Cuz the teachers stuck us in the mire
…our brains got stupid and it’s dire / Then well run away inside a tire

I don’t know…what to think / but it makes me want to drink
I cannot decide / I cannot decide
Oh, fuck did my mind get gone?/ Shrinking in the singing dawn
I got sad today / make it go away

I cannot decide what we should do / And our brains got fried inside the loo
Drinking singing spirits in the can / Sinking, thinking we can kill the man

I don’t know…what to think / but it makes me want to drink
I cannot decide / I cannot decide
Oh, fuck did my mind get gone?/ Shrinking in the singing dawn
I got sad today / make it go away

My friend he said / it’s better to be dead
Than be in the school that got inside our dumb and stupid heads
I don’t know what to think of anything / Maybe he’s right about what it would bring
And my friend is smarter than me / and this end would make us all free
Even if we’re to die on this night / it would bring about a certain sacred singing light

We will dance inside the flames / tell the teachers we’re not tame
Singing in the dawn / with our flame-shirts on
We are burning it all down / Ashes singing in the ground
We’re the burning trees/ and we will be free

Now it's clear
There's no fear
We have beer
There's no fear


We will dance inside the flames / tell the teachers we’re not tame
Singing in the dawn / with our flame-shirts on
We are burning it all down / Ashes singing in the ground
We’re the burning trees/ and we will be free

One day, I started writing a song about a fucked up school. Then, a few days later, that lawsuit came out, involving those pervy professors in the Dartmouth Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I was all, oh, my stars!!! That’s where I got my Ph.D.! Then I finished writing the song about a week later. I thought it was just a song about how the school system fucks up kids, but after I finished writing and recording it, I realized parts of it were about my experiences in that poopy psych department (the unconscious mind works in mysterious ways). In any event, I decided to write an album about a fucked up school in order to process my experiences of having been in that department and how the culture there impacted me. This album ain’t necessarily about Dartmouth, per se. It’s more of a weird, inner exploration where I’m, like, having a fucked up dialogue with my unconscious about my experiences at Dartmouth. Jung used to call that kind of stuff “active imagination.” So far, this album follows the story of a girl, whose guardian angels try to protect her, but often can't find her.

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