Show Me The Money

Song: "Lump Sum"
Artist: Bon Iver
Album: For Emma, Forever Ago
From: Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Year: 2007

The beginning of "Lump Sum" sounds like a church choir warming up in some religious abbey in Romania. It turns into brilliant 1,2's of acoustic melodies swooning like Grizzly Bear or Beach House.

"Sold my cold knot/A heavy stone
Sold my red horse for a venture home/
To vanish on the bow --
Settling slow/
Fit it all, fit it in the doldrums/
(Or so the story goes)/
Color the era/Film it's historical"

Bon Iver is clearly one of the breakout bands of 2008, even though this album was released in 2007. I love: "Color the Era". How would we color this era? It can't be black, white or grey because those are shades. We need something with pigments, something dense and thick and saturated. How about a sauvignon-red wine? No, too cliché. I'd say a muted yellow, for all uncertainties and relating to the shit we're so deep in. Jungle yellow.

So I take it Bon Iver goes from church abbey to valley/forest/Shrek-land (red horse) to a boat. After all they're "Settling slow" [In lyric analysis]. In our lives we HAVE to fit it all "in the doldrums", no matter how exciting, humdrum, or expensive it all may add up too. Life is a lump sum, but what is its net worth? What do we value our daily ventures without actually totally our real life expenses? What does travel time and phone catch-ups and bars equate to?

This whole folkie/neo/indie sound is not new, yet Bon Iver plays so elegantly-simplicity within complexity- it's like a new era...breaking dawn. Thanks, Stephenie Meyer. The image below is picturesque. The dollars and cents and ATM's I see in my mind when I hear this song equate to this simple snapshot of a human, wood, nature, and a saw. Is this all we need? Please say YES.



Bon iver, in French, translates to: the coldest winter. Bon Iver is traveling in and out of seasons with graceful hums and la-de-da's. Wooden, unshaven, and the perfect red flannel.

Icelandic

Artist: Sigur Rós

Album: Ágætis Byrjun

just listen to it all.

Album: Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust


^ Bonnaroo 2008- so thrilled I could be a part.

Fire, Fire, Fire!

Song: "Two Magpies" & "Sing the Changes"

Artist: The Fireman (Paul McCartney & Youth)

Album: Electric Arguments

From: UK

Year: 2008

I had an incident with fire once.  It was my junior year of college and I was pouring hard spaghetti in a boiling pot of water around twilight.  A noodle slipped inside the stove/underneath the Williams Sonoma pot and caught fire.  Skinnier than I feather I still managed to wreak havoc in the kitchen. That is when I turned to my roommate and screamed "Fire! Fire! Fire!" Each "Fire!" louder than before because my roommate clearly did not understand what "Fire!" meant the first two times.  I thought the stove was going to explode.  By the time I turned back to the pot, the fire was gone, noodle black, roommate laughing.  

A new type of fire is The Fireman's third album, Electric Arguments.  Here we listen to the flames of multiple concoctions that make these two brilliant artists boil.

Electric Arguments cover art:

"Two Magpies"

Why, when I hear the Paul McCartney influences in this song do I think of The Floorwalkers, a Columbus, OH based band?  This is discouraging.  Not for all, but for me.  I don't know, maybe it's because I never saw The Beatles live.  Electric Arguments, is based on an Allen Ginsberg poem, "Kansas City to St. Louis", so back then.  I hadn't even heard about The Fireman until recently, though now that I have, I realized I must've been living happily under a rock.

"Two Magpies" has an easygoing feel- good for a road trip, drinking coffee on a Sunday morning, or cleaning around the xmas tree.  It's good for anything, fuck, who am I to judge where or why you should listen to Sir Paul.   Granted four stars by The Times and Rolling Stones, The Knight and Youth pull of a stellar album that enables one to feel many things when listening.  What do I mean by this?  Each song sounds so completely different than the previous, you just have to question their influences in current pop/rock music and how long the recording took place.  

For example, "Sing the Changes", the next track on Electric Arguments, is so U2ish I swear Bono was in the room with commentary.  Wide exclaimed messages of :CHANGE: and :PEACE: are still being tried by the duo; because sadly the message wasn't understood 40 years ago.  "Sing the Changes" is a stadium song, ready to fill arenas with doobie smokers and "angel headed hipsters".  Acoustic and electric guitars join to what appears to be a dulcimer, simmering the first seventeen seconds like a pot of precious gold.  The duo are the miners that never stop.  They dig and dig for new waves in music, humoring travels of communication,mocking alias', and voicing ideals because they can.  And we love them for it.  

just because...

Water and Music

Song: "Streamside"

Artist: The Album Leaf

Album: In A Safe Place

From: San Diego, California

Year: 2004

As the snowflakes are beginning to fall (and stick) in my backyard grass, weeds, and porch banister, I come to find The Album Leaf's music is even warmer than before.  I can sit fireside with a cup of hot chocolate (or Bailey's) and slowly drift somewhere deep in my head.  "Streamside" is exactly the type of song I think of when things are mellow, could be better or worse, but I'm content because so and so correlated with this and that, and everything will be okay.  You have those moments?  To be clear[er], "Streamside" is the kind of song that's good for grass-laying, sky-staring, or tuning out the city but watching it at the same time.

The Album Leaf can be compared to Explosions in the Sky or El Ten Eleven, though the drums aren't as heavily used in their music.  Sometimes when you google this band, you might see advertisements for yoga practices, although I do not think The Album Leaf is yoga appropriate.  "Streamside" is exactly it's title.  I wonder where it was written or thought of.  Was Jimmy LaValle sitting next to some random stream in Western Pennsylvania or down a small valley in Southern Cali?  The songs longing for that small piece that's missing in our lives replays itself in the accordion drools.  The acoustic guitars comply so harmoniously, they sound like a lullaby I forgot from my childhood- there's a familiarity in this tune that makes this song comfortable.  No pretense.  No fret.  You can watch the fishies (purposely childish dreamlike word choice) swim by and as they wish to be colorful and pretty, you can day dream for three minutes and thirty-four seconds.  If you give it a listen maybe your anxieties will go away for a few moments in time, and you can concentrate on what's good.  

I'm 22, That's Old Enough.

Song: "Old Enough"

Artist: The Raconteurs (feat. Ricky Skaggs & Ashley Monroe)

Album: Old Enough

Year: 2008

From: Nashville, TN

Just enough country and never enough alternative, "Old Enough" satisfies by yearning to live in Tennessee by a river drinking whiskey from a barrel.  Because we all know I'll probably be fifty by the time I do that and have more of a reason to, I'm just gonna say 'So for now, I'll play Jack White's new folkie song over and over again.'

"You never speak so I have to guess you're not free-ee-ee", sings Monroe.  These days what or who is free?  I was just in DC and saw a little reminder outside the Korea Memorial, "Freedom is not free".  So whatdoioweya?  

Jack sings, "Well maybe when you're old enough, you'll realize you're not so tough/and somedays the seas get rough".  White and Monroe, "You're too young to have it figured out/you think you know what you're talking about/you think it'll all work itself out."

We're young.  We think we know everything.  And then we visit our grandparents and we come to find  we are clearly wrong.  Come to think of it, even our grandparents can't predict out futures anymore with the way the world is currently turning.  But maybe this banjo will get them off the couch, and we can dance a little diddy with them just to make sure they remember how.  This song is a not-so-pleasant reminder that I'm getting older, but at least the downbeat is enough for me to clank my drank against any wooden bar and smile.  The Raconteurs really do need to receive more credit for their artistry.  I think they are one of the best band;s of my generation, and I DID VOTE for them on NPR's album of the year.  [Hello NARAS, wake up!] They rock out, they country-out, and they blend genre's without so much as a blink, as if there were no genre's to be categorized in.  

"Old Enough's" muse is "Little Suzie".  "Wake up", they preach to her pearly ears...or beg her, depending how much you read into the song.  We are all little Suzie's, or at least my friends; who need to wake up to the fact that college is over and the world is ours...well sort of.  Now there's a shitlong list of how much stuff we need to accomplish in order to be remotely considered applicable.  The singles artwork is pretty damn clever, with a no-so-young-lady (Suzie, I presume) writing a letter to a pen pal of sorts.  It's in black and white, has a Victorian-era undertone, and Jack Lawerence is reflecting within Suzie's little desk mirror.  Hey there fella, how you doin?  A bird cage and old photographs hang pinned above Suzie's desk; could she possibly be reminising of old love-battles, waging "if it was worth it", questioning her life decisions?

"Old Enough" reminds anyone of any age that we are not free.  We are somehow tied to the ship of commerce and dollar signs, heading due East.  Fuck, we couldn't even pay for the gas to fill the damn boat.  The song winds down without dying down with the artists repeating, "You're not free".  It's our neon warning to GET OUT NOW.  But the question is, where do we go?  I have no fucking clue as much as the next Suzie, but I do know you should buy and listen to this song.  Peace.

Giddy Gideon

Song: "Gideon"
Artist: My Morning Jacket
Album: Z
From: Louisville, Kentucky
Year: 2005

It really took me by surprise that I could dig a band from Kentucky without a jug of whiskey and a banjo in my hand. It took me even more by surprise when I listened to My Morning Jacket play nearly a four hour set at Bonnaroo. So hopefully I will take you by surprise when I admit my love for this track even after I have found out what it means.

What is a Gideon? By golly it's not "what" but a "who". A Gideon is a religious symbol personified as a person in the bible. This symbol is a judge appearing in the Book of Judges. Now, I had to look that up myself seeing that I would have never equated Gideon to something god-related. I'm just not wired that way. I thought a Gideon was some sort of comet or big star lurking far away threatening our solar system with rays only the government is allowed access to. Oh well.

Whole song:
"Gideon.
What have you told us at all?
Make a sound, come down off the wall.
Religion, should appeal to the hearts of the young.
Who are you? What have you become?
You animal.
Come on.
What does this remind you of?
Truly.
Truly we have become.
Hated and feared for something we don't want.
Listen.
Listen.
Most of us believe that this is wrong.
You animal.
Come on.
What does this remind you of?
Animal.
Come on.
What does this remind you of?
Animal.
Come on"


Irregardless of it's connotations, I am taking this song for musical value and the purity which transfixes my ears. Word vomit. Instead of trying or researching (or proving my research) of what a gideonic judge would look like, I pixalate Zeus getting mad at wife number six. What's up hoodie/sweater/Patagonia men? My Morning Jacket, are you questioning the skies and resenting Gideon's duties? Are they making a statement about youth culture amidst haste, waste, and Internet? Are you even religious? I do appreciate the rhyme schematics of "Gideon" and "Come On". Those words contrast each other brilliantly in context, like power v. present. Heaven v. Earth in the battle of realities. This song should be playing in the background of The Real World's promotional commercial; long enough so people will ask "Who is that cool band?!" but not long enough for people to figure out why it's placed in that time, scene and space.

Crack What's Crooked.

Song: "Luisa's Bones"
Artist: Crooked Fingers
Album: Forfeit / Fortune
From:Seattle, Washington
Year: 2008

Two seconds in and your head will be bopping like bippity boppity boo actually worked! Somehow the lyrics describe a lazy river with a speedy pace successfully alongside Mexican horns and guitar rhythms. I feel like I should buy a beer at a taco stand, maybe in downtown L.A., like they do in Crazy/Beautiful. "Luisa's Bones" is a little story that would fit an indie/adventure seekers fairytale scene. Cool water, hot sun, lost bones, open flannel shirts, the leaving behind of something. I see a western river looping around mountains as swift as the best Texans lasso.

This song makes me get in the mood...for what I'm still trying to figure out. Maybe right after I fill a tank of gas on the open road and mentally prepare myself for nine hours of spontaneous thoughts and bright sun shadows. Maybe it's what I'll listen to after a visit to a rock stars graveyard in France. Crooked Fingers is entirely crooked in their musical style, but it works. They are cracking their knuckles of restraint and classifications, and just going/working with how they feel at that moment in recording. This song could've been recorded on a Shepard's property in Wyoming and it would fit the vibes shimmering from the independent label. Modern life is searched for in mines and woods, but is it found? The song leaves us with an unknown answer, but tells us the adventure will continue until some answer is found. It's a band of traveling gypsies, "we"'s tell us the band has climbed a lot of hills; and though they are still drifting towards salvation, they have gained and put a few steep climbs behind them.

We Dance Here

Song: "Manhattan"
Artist: Kings of Leon
Album: Only By the Night
From: Tennessee, USA
Year: 2008

I have been lucky enough to see this band live, most recently at the All Points West music festival, in Jersey City, NJ. At the time Only By the Night wasn't released, but the band jammed "Sex on Fire". Twas sexy. A family of good genes, King of Leon has come a long way. After fighting for the right to party in the US (what I'm referring to is their fan base), they have finally succeeded, and in a loud way. Their recent recording has gotten a lot of national and international attention. Strained and drunk as Followill might sound through you're bass speakers, he sounds like he's striving for his best. If I pulled my vocal chords like he does I would be hoarse the next day.

I think the best part of "Manhattan" is the bass line. It leads and follows and side winds, and I can't help but listen more to the bassist, Jared, than any of the other instruments. OK so we have a beat. Now, we'll take that beat and think of Manhattan...it fosh works. Manhattan is the beat of the nation, the leader everyone follows. Not everyone aims for or to be in Manhattan, but one cannot ignore it's urban beauty. The streets are full of life and races, they remind me of the last piece of the global puzzle. New York City is a melting pot; you'll probably learn more here in one day than you will in a month someplace else in the continental US. This album is said to follow under the influence of greats like Radiohead and My Morning Jacket...ah ha! No wonder.

Listen:
"I say who are you
No matter who you are
So you dance all night
And you dance all day"

Manhattan is the place to dance. Dance down the street, in the subway, in the office, in the shops, in the club, in the apartments. The sky is the limit. Literally, it really is. The buildings here reach clouds we only see from Airplanes. I recently read an article in Spin, and Caleb said something to the affect that he wasn't going to let his voice fuck up this album. We'll I'll just say, Caleb, you sound fucking phenomenal. On the track, Caleb moans, "I'm on a hunt to kill". Is he hunting in the big city, like a bear in it's natural habitat? Teeth bared and gleaming he's taking everyone down with him, including other musicians on the charts. "It's gonna keep on keep on keep on/ and then forever run". So I take this literally in my analysis, and because I love New York (hate the shirts proclaiming the latter). The city will keep on keep on keep on, and no terrorist or state or politician will stop us. Bright lights are made for dancing, go groove.

Oh and can I just add, Manhattan is like the dance capital of the nation. Go dancers! We'll hip and hop and roll and throb and we'll love it because Manhattan loves us.


Above is the view of the skyline from my side, and I see this when I see I hear this song. It was my mac background for years, and I would just gaze into the screen when homesick. Almost as if if I stared long enough I could apparate onto Mulberry Street and grab a cup at Balducci's.

Floating Fire

Song: "If There's a Rocket Tie Me to It"
Artist: Snow Patrol
Album: A Hundred Million Suns (Deluxe Version)
Year: 2008
From: Dundee, Ireland

The beginning of this song puts me in some sort of beautiful trance. Like the end of an intense yoga session and you rise like you've just awakened for life. Or as if you're seeing space for the first time, floating next to stars. Gary Lightbody's slight obsession with space and time travel may have something to do with this peaceful opener, which builds like the sun rises. It's mysterious like a little alien but as welcoming as a southern mother. A GREAT album opener.

Two years after Eyes Open, Snow Patrol hasn't changed their tone or tune, and that's why I love them. Eyes Open was an entire album full of goodies. Love songs and travel songs and songs I could listen to twenty times and never get bored. It was a stellar album to listen to on dark roads, formfitting to the convenient lyrics: "headlights on dark roads". Waving hand outside of the glass VW window (thanks, Trudy) against the wind; part of me was flying. Eyes Open climaxed almost as good as Kid A, and that's saying a lot. The songs were best one after another, instead of lingering singles. The radio decided to ignore this, of course, and played "Chasing Cars" so much I wanted to barf. On their new album consistent melodies and rhythms thread to the past, such as, "Lifeboats", and "Please Just Take These Photos from Me".

"If There's a Rocket Tie Me to It" begins: "Two weeks like a surplus reprieve/ I found a hair the length of yours on my sleeve/ I wound it round and round my fingers so tight/ it turned to purple and our pulse formed inside/ and I knew the beat 'cause it matched your beat/ I still remember it from our chest to chest and feet to feet."

Alright. Clear intimacy. But I don't feel like I'm invading. Gary loved it so much he is inviting us to hear his heart beat-enter drummer. His orgasm is on fire; primitive and volatile, wild in nature and space. Can you be wild in space? I don't know, I think you would just float, but maybe past pluto it's possible.

Gary seems to only remember "a pulse, a pulse", must have been some intense one on one sessions. Both bed and studio. I want to know how my pulse differs from someone elses. They all feel the same, but what is the attraction to a specific pulse? It's the love behind the blood. The face behind the veins.

Jump to: 3:11 on the track. "Whoa whoa whoa" the band repeats. Something as surprised them. Something is happening. The trees move, the pulse is all around them. I wonder if they took any drugs while recording? It's as if their senses are heightened and everything is glorified. The lights seem brighter, the trains seem faster. Snow Patrol is hungry for the pulse of life/nature/humans. Have you ever seen things pulse? Besides a wrist or neck. How about grass or pillows or colors? How about a page in a book, fluttering like eagle wings? Have you seen fire come to life? Everything pulsing comes to life like Grimm stories, guiding your own pulse by your immediate surroundings. Everything is one, organic, and flowing with the pulse of energy glowing in the world like Sigur Ros' orbs. My favorite lyrics, "I break you don't, I was always set to self destruct though ". His sacrifice, his submission and admittance. It's like silk against rock, water running along marble. The structure will never be worn thin, his voice carries too far to be intimidated or pushed away. You can't shrug or sway to this song, you have to smile. I would die to see this song live. This is one of my "favorite bands" I've never seen live. Hello Santa, it's Ash.



Someone in this band wants to fly out of the solar system.

Skinny Bitch

Song: "Ballad of a Thin Man"

Artist: Bob Dylan

Album: Highway 61 Revisited

Year: 1965

From: Duluth, Minnesota

Highway 61 Revisited made a seismic crack in the continent of folk music, decoded routes of unwilling fans and initiated parkways of electric usage.  Initial brooding chords remind me of a carnival freak show: "You walk into the room"- immediately unleashes a loner.  A person who's being stared at and staring.  I see ferris wheels and tents in black and white, wavering with southern heat.  A secret is hiding in the mind of Mr. Jones.  Dylan partners "lepers and crooks" in the same line.  Two scarred souls are family to one another; though in the everyday scheme they are people unwanted, hated, feared, unsteady.  A "one-eyed midget" welcomes hitchhikers and family strays stinky as dogs to the tent where all oddities become one.

Can Dylan justify these unfair qualities into some translatable mood? The answer is, well yes. He portrays these characters not within a story line, but like puppets on a stage of mean machinery. One for each string. The geek is a freak. Dylan may be associating his self as one of those puppets, trying to pull the string of record tyrants off his back- ultimately he becomes the freak who stands out, musically. We like this freak. This song has always reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Dylan has a "sword swallower" and so does the book of traveling outsiders. Dylan is alone on the desert plains, spinning Mr. Jones with his windmill of questions. Desolate sunsets and dark alleys loop brilliantly morphing shadowy rhythms with words, creating patterns of fear. Should we be scared?  You decide.  Think about it, have you ever been willing to enter the freak tent at a carnival, knowing you would be the freak because you're the only "normal" person standing and staring?  Staring is rude, you know.  Or maybe you weren't scared to enter the tent because you retorted you're own fear to fake abnormalities.  Shunning the possibility of a fifth limb or mermaids tail, not being able to admit they or it might actually be real.  I think it would be pretty cool if evolution slickly fooled us.  Quiet on the nomad horizon, hush your judgements.

In Rolling Stone issue 937, it's says "[Ballad of a Thin Man] delivered the definitive sixties comment on the splintering hip/straight fault line: 'Something is happening here, but you don't what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?' ".  Dylan could be referring to the "Joneses", a prototypical American family.  He's might be questioning average American standards, values, cores, and traditions.  This, in retrospect, would be living up to his counterculture attitude that all 1960s musicians carried like a chip on their shoulders.  It has been said "Mr. Jones" could also reference various journalists who could not or refused to understand Dylan's songs and ideas.  In this song, Mr. Jones doesn't know what's happening "here", can't make sense of the situation he's seeing/hearing/feeling.  He's lost, a panoramic aloofness but somehow has to procure results because it's his job.  Tough life.  

It's hard to tell because Dylan was so frustratingly obscure when it came to his music, yet responded with simple banter, pushing the machinery away unsuccessfully because he was only answering annoying questions with annoyed fragmented bullet points.  "Ballad of a Thin Man" has been covered over twenty times, and most recently appeared in the epic film I'm Not There, covered by Stephen Malkmus.  So in these modern times, who's more of a freak show?  Britney The Tasmanian Spears- blonde, toned, a Jones?  Or Robert Zimmerman, tortured rock god who just notes what he sees?

Like A Stamp

Song: "Blue and Gold Print"

Artist: Mates of State

Album: Re-Arrange us

Year: 2008

From: Lawrence, Kansas (originally)

Husband and wife team, who's treating who right?  I suppose they mean each other, although they're "just a little bit lost", "just a little unkept".  Piano piano intros trum la lum.  Obviously, some sort of toxic love is enabling a childish love.  Is it one of the same?  Yes, maturity and responsibility can be lost in the pitter patter of an organ.  Grace transforms into an angelic child.  An innocence only a five year old can truly exchange as brutal honesty.  I swear I will love you...gaga feed me something warm.  These mates sing about their first meeting, and subsequently became the "greatest day of his life".  Is this one sided?  

Do they have kids, cause this dynamic duo is awaiting what happens after "the kids are all grown"?  Not too sure, but they aren't intimidated by the passing of seconds and how that influences their love.  What is a first love?  A person who you can never forget, that's for sure.  Someone who can creep into your thoughts like a cat on nip.  A mindless love, as they describe.  Someone who doesn't make sense, but still exists in memory.  Not for relishing, at times for annoyance, but mostly for growth, well hopefully.  When MOS sing, "I know he's treating me right".  Is this in compared to the prior "he", or just generally?  Clearly- if they're discussing an old lover- he successfully creeped his way into this song.  

The layers of vocal chorus's and piano chords create a beautiful overlapping of emotions.  A sadness and a victory co-exist.  Past and present combust in harmonies too pretty for the cover art.  A picture frame, or rather this song's picture frame shouldn't be so brooding.  Instead, I think it should resemble "Little House on the Prairie", sans prairie plus flatland. Like Iowa on it's most beautiful day, which I assume would be sometime in October.  A Little house of filled with dark wood and tiny silver frames, sitting on the outskirts of some dirty turnpike.

Listen for the love, and I'm wondering, do you see Kansas, California, Green Gables, or a random hotel room?

Balancing The Spin

Song: "Spinning Plates"
Artist: Radiohead
Album:Amnesiac & I Might be Wrong: Live Recordings
Year: 2001 (Amnesiac)
From: UK

Radiohead. Dear dear Radiohead. This has to be one of my favorite songs by them. Amnesiac is an album to conquer no matter how you look at the equation of lyrics and Jonny's guitar and Yorke's desolate voice, bound for some sort of video game hell. "Spinning Plates" originates from the reversed backing track of "I Will". Yorke learned the lyrics backwards, and then sang the reversed lyrics backwards. His droning claims clouds too high for airplanes, clouds only glimpsed by lucky astronauts and turquoise carebears.

What feels like spinning plates? What is this thing or feeling or event or drug that makes Yorke sound so uneasy about his whereabouts? The song begins as if the band's on an uneasy precipice, like they're about to jump off Mount Everest or something so daunting they can't bear but to chatter the words again again and again. The rusty flipping sounds like records being tossed through hands of evil DJ's, but in a good way, for the sound. You follow me?

It's like Radiohead took the sound of spinning, the vibrations of a birds wings or the noise of a propeller, and made it somehow perfectly fit their perplexing mood. Did they record in a cave? If I was recording this song I might need to be in a darkened hole with no mirrors so as to avoid pictures of my own warped mouth, voice, and eyebrows.

Spinning plates make me nervous.

When you see an acrobat or talented street artists toying with glass that's not meant for anything else than gluttony...I mean it gets you riled. I'm thinking 'don't drop them!' or 'If you drop them it'll be funny but sad because you can't maintain the pressure of a perfect circle'. The inordinate balance of degree is relayed in this song. Radiohead is sublime in every way possible. I bow down.

Bixby's Geography

First attempt.

Song: "Bixby Canyon Bridge"

Artist: Death Cab For Cutie

Album: Narrow Stairs

Year: 2008

From: Bellingham, Washington

"Until I eventually arrived at the place where you soul had died.  

Barefoot in the shallow creek, I grabbed some stones from underneath, 

and waited for you to speak to me.  

And the silence it became so very clear that you had long ago disappeared. 

I cursed myself at being surprised that this didn't play like it did in my mind." 

What do I get from this?

I see Gibbard underneath the bridge, at a ridge or in the middle of a creek or standing on a dirt hills, like the ones bums sleep under sometimes, fighting against starvation and heat exhaustion.  Gibbard is surprised his imagination didn't fit the reality of the situation- with a loved one, with the scenery?  Right place, wrong time?  What happens if he keeps imagining wrong?  He doesn't like incorrect imagining (see last line quoted lyrics).  Was he there with someone else, or reaching out to someone that has let this world, like a spirit of ghost?  Is this dead person a personal lover, or someone rather famous?  

To me it looks like this person has been gone for quite some time.  Gibbard might find solace in the place underneath this iconic bridge.  Maybe he left on bad terms with this person, or maybe his grief cannot let this spirit go.  Clearly the silence fails to appease his mind.  He wants some sort of response, a sign in verbal form, or a nature sign, or a wave of abrupt emotion.   

Why Bixby Canyon?  

Bixby Canyon is a bridge Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (to name a few) referenced in a lot of their stories- whether fragmented, hinted, hidden, or explosively obvious.  Part of the beatnik's beat.  A bridge connecting two lands with gorgeous scenery overlooking the pacific ocean. Was Gibbard somewhere near this bridge in California when this song was written?  Or did he go there, leave, and was then inspired to write this song?  Ginsberg wrote about the bridge in the fall, for his piece titled "Bixby Canyon".  He said, "...bouquet of old seaweed/ on a striped blanket, kelp tentacle spread/ round the prayer place."  Ginsberg references Neal Cassidy in the poem, referring to others writers of the beat generation.  Maybe he was there with Cassidy at one point, or Cassidy there by himself, wandering the ferns, picking the grass, or making sand castles.

Favorite climax:

2:39- BCB picks up like hurricane winds, becoming blurrier and blurrier by the second, taking a dream-like quality.  The buzzing undertone of selected instruments wind together creating a climatic mix- like different flavors of cotton candy being blended together.  This bridge, probably intended to echo the song's title, is the literal transition from Gibbard's mind to paper to record.  He says "dream" enough for us to get he may have been dreaming under the Bixby Canyon Bridge.  He may have been dreaming of the bridge.  He may have been dreaming of someone else on the bridge, or riding across it at one point on tour.  I see colors of the sunlight, moonlight, afternoon light, the Pacific's natural beauty.  Something pure, waves of colors and emotions.  A place fighting pollution and destruction, forcing dreams which can't ignore the location they spawned from.  A subconscious significance.  

Listen.

Feedback.