Showing posts with label Punch Brothers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Punch Brothers. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Punch Brothers' Who's Feeling Young Now?

This morning I listened to Punch Brothers' Who's Feeling Young Now?, and I noticed two small things about some lyrics.

"Who's Feeling Young Now?"

There's something of a reference to Icarus in the line "She said, 'Hey, you look a lot like someone I liked who flew just far enough under the sun to never come down'" (I'm not even going to try figuring out where the line breaks go there).  In the story of Icarus and Daedalus, Daedalus makes wings for himself and his son in order to escape the labyrinth.  He warns his son not to fly too close to the sun, lest the heat melt the glue and the wings fall apart, but Icarus doesn't heed his advice.  He does fly too close to the sun; the glue melts; and he plummets into the ocean.  So, the "someone... who flew just far enough under the sun" isn't like Icarus.

"Patchwork Girlfriend"

There's some great parallelism in the phrase "No false start or dead end," and because of that book-ending of terms ("start" and "end"), there's sort of an implication that nothing in the middle will go wrong either.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Punch Brothers' "No Concern of Yours"

This morning I listened to Punch Brothers' Who's Feeling Young Now?  I'd forgotten that there was whistling near the end of "No Concern of Yours."  It doubles the melody during the "When your name is on his building" part (at least I think that's what the lyrics are).  The whistling itself took me a few listenings to discover, if I remember correctly.

But rediscovering it now, I realized that it's sort of related to the lyrics.  The actual concern in the song isn't really defined since the speaker/singer is trying to avoid talking about it, but his insistence to not talk about it suggests that it's important.  (At least, that's my understanding.)  And I think the whistling helps to indicate that.  It's the same sort of thing as in old movies and television shows where people start whistling to disguise the fact that they're nervous about something.