Originally Posted by: Jolly McJollysonSo the first verse, for me, starts us off with an apocalyptic feel, "who's left?" No problem with that. We see the speaker, then, walking through a land of cold and corpses, himself a corpse, his "skin white and peeling." Speaker meets significant-other figure, speaker breaks out of dead (mundane) zone yadda yadda.
Second verse, deferring knowledge of the other figure yadda yadda.
Third verse, speaker here doesn't make any mention of "feeling." Unlike the other two verses, the feel of living is gone, opting instead to simply appear alive so that he can attain knowledge of the "other" figure (in literary scholarship we'd see that as an attempt at a dominant relationship to that figure). While he attains that knowledge, that she's apparently a listener and/or very similar in lifestyle to the speaker and/or a lesbian depending on what "everything" and "that's what I do" constitute (A. that the other's "that's what I do" means she listens, which I doubt because she would have done it earlier as well, B. that the other's "that's what I do" means she shares the same "everything" as the speaker, C. that the "everything" constitutes the speaker's attraction to the opposite sex, specifically the addressed, to which she replies "that's what I do" and in fact is attracted to women, or even D. that the speaker's everything is simply his expression of feelings for her, and her "that's what I do" means breaking hearts). Option "D" would change the meaning of the second chorus, which, I think, makes it the most viable for the song.
And no, I don't know your personal meaning for this song. How do you interpret it?
That's very interesting. I never thought of it that way, but I can certainly see how you got that.
The way I see it (after having written it) is that it's about a guy who falls in love with a hooker. He's kind of a bland, depressed guy, and he doesn't want her so much for sex as for companionship. She teaches him to enjoy life more, and he does. Maybe. I don't know, when I wrote the ending, I kind of had it in my head as a negative thing. Like, I imagined him complaining to her about how she "screwed up" his life (by making him see things in a more positive light), and her smiling as she listened. Not because she's malicious or anything, just because, well, that's how she is.
The chorus implies that he's now holding tight to the positive outlook she gave him, but it does him no good, as he's in love with a prostitute, and it can never be.
The only catch is that you almost have to ignore the first line of the song. It makes sense to me, in the prostitute context, but I can't for the life of me explain why.
