No, this isn’t a stalker song. It’s a post-religious reflection on love, death, and whatever may come after it – even if it’s nothing.
Death Cab for Cutie have married ironic imagery with a love song that is as pure and devoted as anything in Wuthering Heights. It’s all there in the chorus :
If Heaven and Hell decide / that they both are satisfied /and illuminate the “No”s on their vacancy signs / if there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks / then I will follow you into the dark
It’s so great to do three things all at once:
- poke fun at the notion of heaven and hell;
- say that the world should have had just about enough of saints and sinners;
- invoke the image of going through life as though you were on the lam – eating in bad diners and hiding out in desperate motel rooms.
In the second verse the baladeer ruminates on the strict catholic education which tried to (lovingly) beat into him the notion that “Fear is the heart of love.” He of course rejected it, (and really why did it take so long for people to figure that out?) yet still he holds on to the notion of a soul, but not too seriously; the chorus uses it in the classical sense, but in the last verse he uses its homonym (sole) describing four broken down and travel weary shoes as stand ins for the two aged bodies which he hopes are still very much in love.
He then goes the extra mile to prove the difference between love and fear. He is not afraid of her death, or his, nor is he clinging to something that could one day pass. He is talking instead about the purest manifestation of love: the desire to simply be in the presence of the beloved. Even if there is nothing beyond life but a darkness, the lover pledges to be there too. It is simply, earnestly, beautiful.
November 9th, 2011 at 8:31 am
Great song. Great take on the song. You put words to a lot of what I was thinking-feeling about the song. Nice.