You Catch Your Plank Above

PLANKABV

In this song, the girl is really depressed, and there's all this depressing imagery and stuff. She's in a bad way. She's in so much of a bad way, that the angels are really concerned about her and realize they gotta move fast if they want her to retain any teeny tiny fragment of mental well-being. (See below if you're unfamiliar with this project).

When I got the hook of this song from a dream, the lyrics didn't make sense to me at first; but, then, I realized, oh, wait, these lyrics are about what it would be like to be on fire (or to be an actual fire) and accidentally catch an upper floor of a building on fire.

See, when the dream-song came to me, I'd just watched a show where a house burns down in it. Like, in this song, the girl is so depressed that she feels like a fire catching everything on fire. And she sees holes as being everywhere, including inside herself.

Actually, that hole-thing, that applies to a lot of us in this day and age. I think most of us are empty, full of holes, with nothing to fill them in. That's because our world is really fucked up, and as such, it fills us with holes.

Weird plank above
Here's last week's song, if you play it backwards.

The lyrics are:

Oh, fuck, I don’t know what to think of

You catch your plank above

All the things that sting the silent doves

You catch your plank above

Everything is inside of the hole that opened up in there

It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere

And I do not know that thing called love

You catch your plank above

Does it sing on wings of silent doves

You catch your plank above

Everything is inside of the hole that opened up in there

It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere

And I think we have some cause for concern

We’d better go and find her now before she gets burned

She is beginning to sound like she is depressed

Sitting in the middle of a steaming screaming mess

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. The angels at some point decide that they have to protect the girl from those nasty teachers and start to plot against them. But then they realize they don’t want to actually harm the teachers, so they, instead, make the teachers’ brains into nature brains ™, which are basically brains that hear communications coming from nature spirits. The angels do this because they think it’ll give those teachers more empathy, and will, in turn, be nice to the students.