![]() Everything that happened – to me, to us, to anyone – was just a prelude to this. ![]() But the song’s conceit is not conceited: it is a way of understanding the magnitude of love. That effortless audacity is characteristic. In its first two lines, Lenker dispenses with the entire history of the universe up to her birth (“After the first stars formed, after the dinos fell/After the first light flickered out of this motel…”). ‘After the dinos fell’: the world of Adrianne Lenker It may also be the straight-up sexiest thing that Lenker has ever sung (“Take me to the back of your pick-up truck,” she implores at one point, “show me a thing or two.”).Īnd now here’s the other way to think about ‘Born for Loving You’: no-one else on earth could have written this song. That influence hasn’t been as pronounced since (manifesting merely in the odd cover, with Lenker slipping back into Lucinda-voice), but as the band prepares to tour with Williams this summer, here’s a song – co-written with drummer James Krivchenia – that in its feel and its hook could be seamlessly snuck into Williams’ setlist. The simple way first: when the band’s frontwoman, Adrianne Lenker, was a student at Berklee, her music showcase betrayed the powerful influence of the husky, highway-fixated alt-country chanteuse, Lucinda Williams, right down to the very voice she was affecting. If you want to understand it, there is a simple, biographical way. When we die we return to that singularity and unity with all other things.There is a song that Big Thief have recently started playing called ‘Born for Loving You’. I think the “walk you to the shore” is a reference to the Buddhist metaphor of the wave where each life is a wave, but it’s connected to an entire ocean. She wants no part in the war of these higher forces, she only wants her brother back. ![]() She describes him as her river of light, a remembrance of their unity. Those color choices are specific though and they are opposite ends of the color spectrum, relating back to the prism key.īorn in the hospital (the 31st floor of the simulation swarm) the first thing they see is the fluorescent light, a symbol of their disconnect. The empty horses galloping through the violet door, following red crooked courses is a metaphor for insemination/fertilization. The prism is the key to the simulation, scattering the light into a spectrum, creating a myriad and allowing for individuality and separation. In the afterlife, where all is one, it is a bright white, the combination of every color. The prism metaphor goes back to the theme of light. ![]() The tree has been plucked of its fruit and “rises with a prism key”. What once held a breeze so strong it restrained the sparrow is now stagnant. She is standing in the bastardized remains of the garden of Eden (also a metaphor for the womb). The lines about the swallows in the field and the pale green tree are callbacks to sparrow. She recalls watching him enter the simulation from the afterlife, building an energy shield in his room (the mothers womb) to protect him from the inherent sin and divisiveness that comes from a dualistic world. ![]() He already senses his mother “cutting at the silent clay”, metaphorically creating and preparing the world for him to enter. She can’t figure out how to stay there alone while he is born (entering the simulation). The story starts with them in “heaven” or some realm outside of the universe. Looking at this, the story begins to come together. She describes her brother as an Angel, born tangled in blood and vine which draws a parallel with Jesus, born without original sin, yet subject to the sin of the simulation that stemmed from Adam eating the apple. Think of a hospital for example- the bare white walls are like a simulation of purity and cleanliness. Those lights are usually found in sterile settings, which makes sense attached to the word simulation (robotic, detached, unreal). The beginning of the chorus makes me think of the low vibrational hum that those offensively bright fluorescent lights make, almost like a swarm of insects. My initial thoughts of the lyrics are a sister writing to her brother who she views as something pure that she wants to protect from an otherwise tainted and detached world. I’m a relatively new listener, only just starting this album and I’ve always wonder what the cohesive story of Simulation Swarm is and I think I finally get it. ![]()
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