Showing posts with label Goodbye and Hello. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goodbye and Hello. Show all posts

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Tim Buckley's "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain"

This morning I listened to Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello.  I think the last two or three times I listened to it, I felt that something was off in a verse of "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain," and this morning I finally figured out what it is.  There's a slant rhyme in the first two lines of the third verse:
She says your scoundrel father flies with a dancer called the queen
And with her stolen cards he plays and laughs but never wins
"Queen" and "wins" don't really rhyme, and that bit of jarring seems to help illustrate the "never win[ning]."

When I transcribed this, I noticed something else too:  the grammar in "And with her stolen cards he plays" could be parsed in two different ways.  Taking it out of the inversion helps distinguish them.  It could be either "He plays with her stolen cards" [pronoun][verb][preposition][possessive adjective][adjective][object of the preposition] or "He plays stolen cards with her" [pronoun][verb][adjective][object][preposition][object of the preposition].