One of the things I love dearly about Radio Paradise is the constant exposure to music I would never have found under other circumstances.
A couple times I've heard tracks from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and sometimes they've hit pretty hard, but the one that got me today is the track "There She Goes My Beautiful World". It came up on rotation on my laptop while coding, and I had to pause to listen... which naturally made me look around for the lyrics (it's a long song and doesn't suffer from the common "there's really only 3 verses in this song, we'll just yammer them over and over again" beat so prevalent in modern music.
I decided to do a little googling, and found the lyrics on songmeanings.net (a little heavy on the ads, but some remarkably good commentary from listeners). The song is about someone longing for their muse - their inspiration and their drive to share, express, and excel, coupled with release and need.
Interested? Video and lyrics after the cut... I recommend headphones. Cave is an expressive and intense presenter, though no one would call his vocals beautifully melodic. The arrangement on this track, with the backing singers, is wonderful...
Youtube Video (oddly, not embeddable. Grr.)
Lyrics:
The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air
The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again
John Willmot penned his poetry
riddled with the pox
Nabakov wrote on index cards,
at a lectem, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
imprisoned in a box
And JohnnyThunders was half alive
when he wrote Chinese Rocks
Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years
I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again
Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing Das Kapital
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man,
and went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent's hospital
I will kneel at your feet
I will lie at your door
I will rock you to sleep
I will roll on the floor
And I'll ask for nothing
Nothing in this life
I'll ask for nothing
Give me ever-lasting life
I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again
So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,
brother, and blow it
If you've got a field, that don't yield,
well get up and hoe it
I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it
That you weren't much of a muse,
but then I weren't much of a poet
I will be your slave
I will peel you grapes
Up on your pedestal
With your ivory and apes
With your book of ideas
With your alchemy
O Come on
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send it all around the world
Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again
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