Tag Archives: Closing Time

Song Analyses #52: Erland and the Carnival – Daughter / East India Youth – Song for a Granular Piano

Title: ‘Daughter’
Where to find it: ‘Closing Time’ (2014, Full Time Hobby)
Performed by: Erland and the Carnival
Words by: Erland Cooper

Title: ‘Song for a Granular Piano’
Where to find it: ‘Total Strife Forever’ (2014, Stolen Recordings)
Performed by: East India Youth
Words by: William Doyle

First, the words of ‘Daughter’:*

You could be so much better than me
You will be so much better than me
You could be so much better than me
You will be so much better than me

Even if I kill my soul
Save me from the hell I know
Just before I say goodbye
Loving you won’t die

When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone

You could be so much better than me
You will be so much better than me

Even if I kill my soul
Save me from the hell I know
Just before I say goodbye
Loving you won’t die

When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone
When I’m gone

Now, the analysis:

I’m positive that for someone my age, I’ve thought about death and the process of dying more than I probably should have. When you’ve personally been faced with oblivion multiple times, at the hand of God through no fault of your own, I think it comes with the territory. In my defense, I don’t think it’s weird or even particularly morbid to consider one’s own end. As a biologist, I look at death as a natural process. At the same time though, I am not discounting and am wishing not to discount the emotional weight of the process either on the person who is nearing the end or those who survive that person.

I’ve been thinking about two songs that both broach the sensitive subject, and they seem to have a peculiar association that I hope one day to find out more about. ‘Song for a Granular Piano’ is the last song with actual words on East India Youth’s 2014 Mercury Prize-nominated debut album on Stolen Recordings, ‘Total Strife Forever.’ In addition to arpeggios on piano, on the recorded version there are heavenly, major key, gospel-style backing vocals before Will Doyle’s actual lyrics kick in, filtered through effects that give the delivery an unearthly quality: “Settle down just before the end / sunlight comes floating through the smoky lens / comfort me slowly into the earth / sing the dawn now, sing the dawn now.

The effects on the vocals cause the feeling of the song to be unsettling until the mood changes about a minute later, when you get to the buildup, and it feels like sunshine is streaming in at 2 minutes 40 seconds. I like to think that the uplifting feeling you get from that buildup is supposed to mimic the light one is supposed to see when God is welcoming you towards Heaven. (I fully admit that when my father died, I suddenly felt this terrible, insatiable need to hold on to and to believe that Heaven exists, or else I might crumble under the weight of losing him.)

spotify:track:0ud9RRs1b9bv7iFnLbKUP9

I remember distinctly when I first heard Erland and the Carnival’s ‘Daughter’: it was on a train back home from Philadelphia after a work conference last summer, and I was listening to the entirety of the band’s third album ‘Closing Time’ from start to finish in my preparation to review it for TGTF. During this trip, I remember looking out the window of our car and seeing a blue whale that had been painted to the side of a building in Wilmington, Delaware. (The weird things you remember, huh?) I had been oddly emotional hearing ‘That’s The Way It Should Have Begun (But It’s Hopeless)’ for the first time, and it would be weeks before I fully recognised why, suffering the bitter pain of disappointment of something that could have been but never really had been there in the first place.

On the other hand, ‘Daughter’ was like an immediate sucker punch to the stomach. The press release described how it was conceived (no pun intended) but read here what Simon Tong and Erland Cooper had to say about it from their track-by-track previewing of ‘Closing Time’ for Clash:

10. ‘Daughter’
Simon: Erland wrote and recorded this after the birth of his daughter and half a bottle of whiskey. We purposely made the production and arrangement on this album much more restrained and simple and this song is probably the simplest and most moving.

Erland: I’d recorded this on my phone and then reversed the vocal which then accidently, and to me perfectly, turned into a backing vocal that sounds like it sings ‘…I wont [sic] ever give up’ in parts. Was trying to write and record the simplest song that can say a number of deeper things while saying something completely obvious. It’s more about hopeful reassurance than departure. To be honest, that pretty much sums up the entire record to me.

I agree with Tong: the song is indeed poignant in its simplicity, for what it says – and very briefly so – and what it doesn’t. The birth of a child, a new life borne out of love, out of your and your partner’s own flesh and blood, is a life-changing experience. From what I’ve gathered from all my friends who have children, life changes and priorities change in a blink of a eye with the arrival of a child. Even in a drunken, whiskey-fuelled haze, Cooper’s thoughts about his own mortality stirred up no doubt by the birth of his daughter translated to the eking out of some pretty amazing and thought-provoking lyrics while he contemplated his own departure from this earth and what it would mean to his daughter, now in the moment far too young to have such thoughts. The fact that he was able to commit these words via an elementary recording on his phone, and the recording eventually became the basis for ‘Daughter,’ seems pretty fateful to me.

As Tong says, the song is very simple. Against a backdrop of what I called in my review “a repetitive but music box-like soothing piano melody,” he wishes, then changes his mind and decides that he knows his child will be a better, greater person than he ever was. He also has come to the conclusion that “even if I kill my soul” – when his soul is gone from this mortal plane – he will make the effort before he takes his last breath (“just before I say goodbye“) to confirm that even if he’s physically no longer here with her, “loving you won’t die.

He’s saying as a father to his child, “I may no longer be with you to hold you again, but as sure as the heavens will allow me, I will never stop loving you.” What an mind-blowingly beautiful statement.

I recently started listening to the incredible ‘Closing Time’ album again on my nightly runs, and it only struck me recently how similar the treatments were on the “unearthly scale” (I know, such a scientific term…) in both songs. When I was in Ireland in May, I purchased East India Youth’s newest album ‘Culture of Volume’ at an HMV in Dublin and when I was perusing the liner notes, I noticed the line “Additional mixing to strings by Erland,” which I guessed to be Erland Cooper himself. I wonder now if the sound of ‘Daughter’ had been inspired somehow by ‘Song for a Granular Piano’, which had surely preceded it in development. I also saw on SoundCloud some time ago that Doyle remixed the ‘Closing Time’ track ‘Wrong’ for Erland and the Carnival, another connection. The plot thickens…

However these acts and songs are connected, both ‘Daughter’ and ‘Song for a Granular Piano’ serve as testament that that some of us believe death is not meant to be the end. Or at the very least, those of us who are ‘left behind’ after our loved ones have gone should take comfort that even without their physical presence, we will forever remain loved.

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*I forget where I read or heard it from now, but Doyle stated in an interview that there were some bits of ‘Total Strife Forever’ where lyrics were unintelligible, which makes me think that some of the ‘lyrics’ of ‘Song for a Granular Piano’ were made to be unintelligible on purpose, quite possibly to add to the effect of impending death. I’d rather not take away from the effect by guessing what I’m hearing and possibly transcribe the words incorrectly.

Song Analysis #27: Semisonic – Closing Time

Update 18/01/15: this past weekend, this post was inexplicably barraged by comments, which I thought was a bit strange, given that I posted it on Music in Notes a year ago. A woman with a science background (doubly weird, considering my main vocation) wrote a post a couple days ago, reminiscing about the birth of one of her children, tying this event in with Dan Wilson explaining in 2008 what the song is about. (Google it, and you’ll find said video.)

Personally, I think it’s strange anyone would use anything related to a bar and drinking as a metaphor for the birth of a baby, but that’s artistic license. Also, seeing that the writer has already explained the meaning of his song, this post is now closed to comments.

Title: ‘Closing Time’
Where to find it: ‘Feeling Strangely Fine’ (1998, MCA)
Performed by: Semisonic
Words by: Dan Wilson

There is a small group of songs, definitely numbering less than 10, that I would say I recall sitting in the back of one of our friends’ cars, with the radio turned way up, and everyone knew all the words too. And knew when to break out the air guitar during the solo. To say that ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic was a song that defined my and my friends’ lives in school would be an understatement. The song spoke to me instrumentally first, with the lyrics feeling right for the music, but its meaning didn’t really come to me until I started thinking about what songs I might want to analyse on Music in Notes in 2014.

I pick up song lyrics quickly, and in a world where we generally only listened to regular radio on boomboxes and the internet had barely become a thing, ‘Semisonic’ quickly became one of those tunes that I had on repeat not only on my pathetic sound system at school, but also in my head. It became so large in my ‘mythology’ (I’m being sarcastic; that’s why mythology has single quotes around it) that my girlfriends all knew how much I loved that song. So much that one of them tried to set me up with a guy they knew who boasted he could play the song on guitar and he knew all the words too. (See? Even back then I was hopelessly drawn to musician types.) I turned up for a friend’s birthday party where I was supposed to meet this guy, but he only had eyes for another one of our friends. At the time, I was a little mad. We had the music thing in common, surely he’d be interested in me. What the heck happened?

Turned out he was better suited for our friend anyway, and they ended up getting married, which I am so thankful for because they are one of the few couples I know who support each other through everything. Even when 2 years ago, when they had to say their final goodbyes to their young daughter who had been born with a birth defect, they were each other’s rock as I sat there at the funeral, feeling dumbstruck by grief, wondering how they would continue. And yet they have, because their marriage is one built with so much strength.

Like many of the song analyses I’ve done for this site, I don’t think ‘Closing Time’ is as simple as most people think. Yes, it means ‘time for last orders’, but closing time can also indicate closing of a chapter in your life, and while the two words taken by themselves are ambiguous whether or not that closing is positive or negative, I think without a doubt in Dan Wilson’s world, it’s overwhelming positive.

First, the words:

Verse 1
Closing time
Open all the doors and let you out into the world
Closing time
Turn all of the lights on over every boy and every girl
Closing time
One last call for alcohol so finish your whiskey or beer
Closing time
You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here

Chorus
I know who I want to take me home
I know who I want to take me home
I know who I want to take me home
Take me home

Verse 2
Closing time
Time for you to go out to the places you will be from
Closing time
This room won’t be open ’til your brothers or your sisters come
So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
I hope you have found a friend
Closing time
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end

Chorus
I know who I want to take me home
I know who I want to take me home
I know who I want to take me home
Take me home

Bridge
Closing time
Time for you to go out to the places you will be from

Chorus / Outro
I know who I want to take me home
I know who I want to take me home*
I know who I want to take me home
Take me home

Closing time
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end

Now, the analysis:

If you look straight at the words without thinking about what they mean, ‘Closing Time’ is a pretty repetitive and simple song, isn’t it? I mean, look. “Closing time” gets sung. A lot. Again and again. Even the bridge is stolen from the second verse. It’s important to note that there’s no pretentiousness whatsoever in word choice here, which suits the theory that it’s really a song about a bartender saying “last call!” and taking the last alcohol orders before the lights get turned on and everyone gets kicked out of the joint. But…let’s look for a bit more meaning, shall we?

When a bar closes, people stop drinking because they can’t buy any more booze, and the lights go on. I am more familiar with this concept in the gig setting, where the lights go on after the headline band has left the stage for good. Dan Wilson sings in verse 1, “open all the doors and let you out into the world”. I think this is an amazing setup for something that transcends the end of the night at your local watering hole. Open, close. Open, close. Open, close. (That just made me think of my dentist.) Okay, so the bar closes, which forces everyone in that bar out on the street, “to be let out into the world”. There is something very freeing about that line, which might strike you as odd and contradictory, seeing that “closing time” sounds very final, a conclusion.

“Turn all of the lights on over every boy and every girl”: the lights have turned on, and now everyone can see each other for what they are, warts and all. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here”: if you take this literally, it could mean you have the option to go home with someone else, which is what often happens at bars at the conclusion of the night anyway, right? But I’m thinking “home” in this instance was the life you had before you entered this place: not literally the bar, but that moment in time where you found yourself, examining what you were doing with your life. There’s a moment on the Beatles Anthology where Paul McCartney admits that the thought of taking drugs scared him because it would affect his mind and how “you could never go home…again”. When you come to a turning point in your life, often you can’t go back. Choices have been made, and you have no choice but to keep moving, and to keep moving forward.

The choruses are the repeated lines, “I know who I want to take me home”. When I was younger, I remember thinking this was the oddest words to string together for a chorus. But if you think about the line in isolation, without the song, what Wilson is saying is there is a person for everyone. I think I can safely say that we all have (or had) ideas of what our perfect match would look like, what colour his/her hair and eyes would be, and what kind of person he/she would be. Whether or not in this song this person exists in the protagonist’s life already is irrelevant: this image of perfection lives on his mind and his heart. The repetition serves to drive home this point, that he’s adamant it’s this one person. In the outro version of the chorus, I have put an asterisk where Wilson takes the liberty of adding a bit of flair by changing the notes up a bit.

Verse 2 is more confusing. “Time for you to go out to the places you will be from”: is he talking about past and future lives? “This room won’t be open ’til your brothers or your sisters come”: I honestly don’t know what this means. What room? Whose brothers and sisters? I doubt he means literally someone’s siblings, so I’m guessing he’s referring to the brotherhood (sisterhood?) of man. Maybe these are the ghosts of his loved ones, maybe that’s why he specifies “brothers or sisters”? Now I’m starting to think this verse might be about death. If yes, “So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits / I hope you have found a friend” makes more sense. It is time to go, so take all of your worldly possessions, because you need to leave this astral plane.

And then we come to the most important line of ‘Closing Time’, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Kind of self-explanatory, but it’s useful to tie back into the theme of death, with a subsequent rebirth. But I also really like this line, especially how Wilson sings it so emphatically. It’s not sung sadly or angrily. It isn’t melancholic or regretful, even at the end of the song. It just is. And I like that a lot. We’re not twanging any heartstrings in this song. No-one is hunched over with bloodshot eyes because they’re at their wit’s end and can cry no more. No, this is a song about accepting what has happened and having the strength to move on. And here’s another nice ‘coincidence’. Look at the title of the album where it came from: ‘Feeling Strangely Fine’. Nice one, boys from Minneapolis.

For me, the ending of 2013 was tumultuous, yet oddly cathartic and freeing. Clear as day, like someone had someone taken off my rose-coloured glasses, I saw who really cared about me and who didn’t. In a span of 24 hours, I went from being the unhappiest woman in town to one feeling gratitude for friends who might live far away but have hearts of gold. Now I can go forward into this new year embracing the friends who matter and forgetting the ones who don’t.

Lastly, the song, in its stirring promo form that had my eyes glued to the tv screen. This was before YouTube, you know! There is also a payphone in this video because yes kids, there was a time when we didn’t have mobile phones. Imagine that.