"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
This week is something almost random. As always, it's a song I love, and think I might have something to say about. But it's not famous - it's just a song I found, and that spoke to me, and that I've kept listening to for years.
It's The Mermaid Parade by Phosphorescent, a 2010 song that, as is so common for this series, is yet another song about a breakup.
No, I wound up walking
out by the ocean today
and there were naked women
dancing in the Mermaid Parade.
It's a story-song, but the story is short and specific: the singer is in NYC, soon after a Mexican vacation with his wife Amanda. She's in LA - we don't know if that's where they both live, or she's there for some other reason, just that's where she is. And he buys a ticket to go see her, but ends up missing his flight, and we think giving up on the marriage, to instead watch the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.(Which is still going strong; this year's version just happened a week ago.)
Like so many of the best break-up songs, we don't know why. We don't know whose "fault" it is. We just get the emotion, the moment, the brokenness.
but god damn it, Amanda;
oh, god damn it all.
It's a song about how things can break, irrevocably, in a short time. It doesn't say why or how it broke...but I have to wonder if "those naked women dancing" had something to do with it....
No comments:
Post a Comment