Please explain the lyrics of "$1000 Wedding".

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On another thread, someone just named Gram Parsons "$1000 Wedding" as a song that makes them cry.

And I agree. It makes me cry too, almost every time. It's a song of almost overwhelming emotional force and resonance.

Except for one thing.

I don't understand it.

Because it feels like all the action is off-camera, and no-one has quite told you what is going on. In this respect, you can sympathise with the bewilderment of the groom, to a certain extent. Has the bride died? Has she eloped with someone else? Was she pregnant? Have her family snatched her away? Was there a still-birth? What's going on here?

Your explanations are welcomed.

― mike t-diva (mike t-diva), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 14:14 (5 years ago) Permalink

It was a $1000 wedding supposed to be held the other day
And with all the invitations sent
The young bride went away
When the groom saw people passing notes
Not unusual, he might say
But where are the flowers for my baby
I'd even like to see her mean old mama
And why ain't there a funeral, if you're gonna act that way

I hate to tell you how he acted when the news arrived
He took some friends out drinking and
It's lucky they survived
Well, he told them everything there was to tell there along the way
And he felt so bad when he saw the traces
Of old lies still on their faces
So why don't someone here just spike his drink
Why don't you do him in some old way
Supposed to be a funeral
It's been a bad, bad day

The Reverend Dr. William Grace
Was talking to the crowd
All about the sweet child's holy face and
The saints who sung out loud
And he swore the fiercest beasts
Could all be put to sleep the same silly way
And where are the flowers for the girl
She only knew she loved the world
And why ain't there one lonely horn and one sad note to play
Supposed to be a funeral
It's been a bad, bad day
Supposed to be a funeral
It's been a bad, bad day.

― mike t-diva (mike t-diva), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 14:14 (5 years ago) Permalink

I guess back then, that was a fairly pricey wedding.

― mark grout (mark grout), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 14:23 (5 years ago) Permalink

I always took it as meaning that the girl "left him at the altar", but I gotta say I ain't sure either.

Reading the lyrics makes me realize how much of the emotion is NOT in the words, but in the presentation. What is it about the combination of his flattish/"plain" voice and Emmylou's???

― peepee (peepee), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 15:00 (5 years ago) Permalink

meaning: heartbreak & death are apocalyptic

― Snappy (sexyDancer), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 15:17 (5 years ago) Permalink

Snappy pretty much nails it, but here's a longer explanation. Apologies - it's a while since I read the autobiog. Although the song isn't straight autobiographical, it's strongly informed by his own troubled family life. Gram married his young girlfirend when she got pregnant. Clearly there was pressure put on them to get hitched. There was some business with his alcoholic stepfather getting into a fight at the wedding... Help me out someone - I can't quite remember the story.

― stew, Tuesday, 1 February 2005 15:56 (5 years ago) Permalink

I remember reading somewhere that there were originally some extra verses which got cut out, which might have helped to make the narrative add up....?

Incidentally, I don't MIND if the lyrics don't make sense ... it's just that if a coherent meaning CAN be extracted, then I'd like to know about it.

― mike t-diva (mike t-diva), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:00 (5 years ago) Permalink

It's told from the point of view of the church.

― Snappy (sexyDancer), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:02 (5 years ago) Permalink

I always took it that he gets jilted at the altar. The key is poeple passing notes while he's standing there and everyone except our naive groom acting like its a funeral.

― laticsmon (laticsmon), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:07 (5 years ago) Permalink

girl leaves him at the altar, he goes on a bender.

is the third verse a non-sequitir? is it the reverend officiating at the wedding. the "same beasts" thing just seems like an elliptical way of describing a fire-and-brimstone sermon. but it does seem as though he's actually referring to a funeral in the third verse, doesn't it?

crazy gram.

much of it is a riff on that cliché "hey, cheer up, everyone, this isn't a funeral!"

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:11 (5 years ago) Permalink

i think the $1000 means it's a cheap wedding, perhaps even a shotgun wedding. or perhaps the drabness of the wedding itself adds to the poignancy of it being unfulfilled.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:12 (5 years ago) Permalink

in any event it's the change just before the third verse that makes the song.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:14 (5 years ago) Permalink

i also like these lines, which are--like the whole song--a bit elliptical and open to interpretation:

And he felt so bad when he saw the traces
Of old lies still on their faces

perhaps there were things his friends thought they should have told him before the wedding, but didn't? did the girl run off with someone else? somehow despite all the missing info my picture of the night of the wedding (the bender) is unusually vivid, with this self-destructive groom being trailed by guilty-looking friends concerned for his safety.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:16 (5 years ago) Permalink

this is one of the greatest things ever recorded, and I have no problem saying it's the greatest "country" song ever made. Has anyone else in "country" ever done anything like this? Not that I can recall.

it's pretty straightforward, at least to me. she's gone and the groom showed up anyway. maybe the bride had some history with the groom's friends, hence "old lies." the reverend don't get the score--his proscriptions are "silly" and he doesn't get the fact that the bride-to-be needed to get out and see the world. I think Parsons is comparing the funeral scene, which is a different event, to the wedding, and points out that the platitudes of the Rev don't get at why the bride needed to not show up to the funeral. Parsons shows compassion for both bride and groom.

it's a masterpiece--Parsons's masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned.

― es hurt (ddduncan), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:16 (5 years ago) Permalink

but i also like how those lines place us for a moment in the groom's interiority, which mitigates the way the rest of the song presents the whole fiasco as a spectacle. i think that's indicative actually of the way gram sort of revised country music clichés by merging different modes of country song in unusually and unexpected ways. sorry for the possible banality of that statement.

xpost

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:17 (5 years ago) Permalink

eddie i think the last verse is too elliptically for your "straightforward" interpretation. unless there's an intertextual (referential) element i'm missing. but the idea of the bride "needing to see the world" is intriguing. i'll think about that.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:19 (5 years ago) Permalink

i like how the melody jumps up an octave (?) and gram's singing gets more insistent at the beginning of the third verse, almost "acting out" (in that ambiguous mode of psuedo-identification that only music can achieve) the role of the preacher.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:20 (5 years ago) Permalink

well, it could be that the groom killed himself, thus the funeral. but it seems to me that the last bit about the Rev is there to point out how religion doesn't have the answers to problems like the groom's, or the bride's.

― es hurt (ddduncan), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:23 (5 years ago) Permalink

that seems an awfully specific reading; also it presumes of the song a certain didactic quality i don't think it really has.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:30 (5 years ago) Permalink

The narrator is protesting that no one cares for the missing girl, not the family, who act as if she never existed, not the friends, who obviously have dismissed her as a whore, not the preacher who's more concerned with revelations than earthly matters.

― Snappy (sexyDancer), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:34 (5 years ago) Permalink

I dunno amateurist, I think it's not didactic, but I do think it's fairly specfic...it's country music, you know. The key line in the song is "she only knew she loved the world." Which is what's so great about Parsons, who starts with the usual country assumption that the only thing that matters are traditional values like showin' up at your own wedding, "loyalty," etc., and then explodes them. The bride is the heroine of the song; the groom's out drinking with his worthless buddies--shit, they probably tried to fuck the bride during their engagement--and she's on a bus or a plane to New York.

― es hurt (ddduncan), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:39 (5 years ago) Permalink

i've always loved this song, it reads like Faulkner.

Amateurist, I think what your mishearing as an "octave jump" is Emmylou's harmony (I don't have the song with me, but that's how I hear it in my head).

― gygax! (gygax!), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:50 (5 years ago) Permalink

even gram's vocal jumps up way high on the "rev. doctor william grace" line

faulkner is a good comparison. i'm sure gram was familiar with faulkner too.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:53 (5 years ago) Permalink

Faulkner? Flannery O'Connor?

― es hurt (ddduncan), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 16:59 (5 years ago) Permalink

not grotesque enough

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 17:01 (5 years ago) Permalink

Hang on... I feel a theory coming on.

Couldn't "went away" in the first verse be a euphemism for "she died"? With the notes being passed around the church before anyone even gets round to telling the groom up at the altar, the use of the euphemism heightens the sense that people aren't being strictly truthful with the groom - a theme which continues in the second verse, with the "old lies". In fact, I sense that no-one thinks much of the groom (including the bride's "mean old" mother) - maybe it WAS a shotgun wedding, and maybe the bride died during pregnancy?

So the bride is dead, the wedding is cancelled, the groom goes out and gets drunk that night instead of getting married - during which time he realises that the bride has probably been sleeping with his friends. Maybe it wasn't even his child? Maybe he was duped into the marriage?

This means that Verse Three is the bride's funeral, set at a later date.

I agree that we're meant to find the reverend's platitudes fairly lame and inadequate. Take "she only knew she loved the world" - isn't that a mealy-mouthed reference to the bride's pre-marital sexual history? And then, note the plainness of the funeral: no flowers, no music, barely a worthy send-off at all. It seems that she has died in disgrace, pregnant out of wedlock in a conservative rural community.

In which case, the song's sympathies lie primarily with the groom.

Does that all add up?

― mike t-diva (mike t-diva), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 17:11 (5 years ago) Permalink

the way he sings "the rev dr william grace" contain a hint of something other than scorn or ridicule, though--the song maintains a nice ambiguity about most everything

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 17:15 (5 years ago) Permalink

I'll tell you what. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more economical word-picture in song, though I'd like to offer up 'Fancy' by Bobbie Gentry, which has the added advantage of being funky as hell.

― laticsmon (laticsmon), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 17:20 (5 years ago) Permalink

mike, I think you've got it.

― Snappy (sexyDancer), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 17:21 (5 years ago) Permalink

The first time I ever heard it was c. August 2000, on a tape of Evan Dando singing it live. It immediately inspired me to pick up my acoustic guitar, sit on a bench in the garden in the sun, and write a wedding-based country song of my own.

It wasn't even a bad song, though I don't claim that it was another '$1000 Wedding'.

― the bellefox, Tuesday, 1 February 2005 17:51 (5 years ago) Permalink

"(Save a Bit of That) Wedding Cake (for Me)"

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 18:02 (5 years ago) Permalink

The thing I like about Parsons at his best is how he never quite comes out and says it, you know? Like in "Big Mouth Blues." "So you just tell me what's the sense of me sittin' here leavin'/When any old day I might get even." That's beautiful, so sly.

"$1000 Wedding": I don't think the bride is dead, I think she's just gone, which is maybe even worse. Parsons asks how come there isn't a funeral if you're going to act that way, and then I think he turns the whole thing into a funeral, why the hell not? The implication is that the girl was wild anyway and that the groom's buddies all had suppressed some information about her wild days, but it all showed on their faces anyway. Which again, in the world of Parsons, is just as bad as death, if not worse. Lying. I think it's possible he saying that if you're going to pontificate about the dead and how "death can be put to sleep some silly way," why not talk about the *living*, like the girl, who just wanted to live, get out of New Orleans or Macon or Waycross? Why give flowers to the dead and not to the living? That's my reading of it anyway. Shit, I love this song.

― es hurt (ddduncan), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 19:36 (5 years ago) Permalink

That's a great interpretation. I hadn't thought of it that way before.

― mike t-diva (mike t-diva), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 21:19 (5 years ago) Permalink

Well, I always thought it was mike's interpretation, but this thread is giving me marvellous food for thought. Thanks everyone.

― Bumfluff, Tuesday, 1 February 2005 21:22 (5 years ago) Permalink

Ha, I actually thought about starting this very thread once. I guess I've always thought she died (went away) but was never entirely sure. I just listened to it and it made me well up a bit. Amazing piece of music that can continue to do that even when you've heard it a bunch. Greatest country song? Hmm, I don't know ... I think George's "Wine Colored Roses" is way up there too. Man is that ever a depressing song. "He Stopped Loving Her Today"? I dunno. One of the great things about "$1000 Wedding" is just the music though, specifically that descending two note phrase that recurs throughout ( underneath "like to see / her mean old" and "old lies / still on their faces" and "only knew / she loved the world" ...) That just totally makes the song for me.

― Stormy Davis (diamond), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 22:00 (5 years ago) Permalink

Hey can we do "One Hundred Years From Now" next???

I want to know what kind of trouble we're in...

― Stormy Davis (diamond), Tuesday, 1 February 2005 22:01 (5 years ago) Permalink

2 weeks pass...

I'm still unconvinced about the interpretations given so far. Surely the lyrics contrast the groom's feeling that something bad has happened to the bride with the reaction of the rest of the community which doesn't seem to acknowledge this. The groom feels the lack of flowers and the absense of a funeral with its ceremony. He's not pitying himself, he's thinking about the girl. The question is what could have happened to her that the community doesn't want to talk about? If she'd gone off to a happier life leaving him alone surely his response would be more self-pitying?

Also we can't be sure that 'old lies' refers to the girl's hidden relationships with his friends. They may refer to the cliches that people regurgitate to try to provide comfort when bad things happen.

― Amarga (Amarga), Friday, 18 February 2005 11:09 (5 years ago) Permalink

The only thing I'm certain about with this song is how it makes me feel. That it does this without me knowing specifically why makes it more remarkable, I think.

― peepee (peepee), Friday, 18 February 2005 17:55 (5 years ago) Permalink

i think a lot of the lyrics serve more of a formal function than anything else, they're just playful (like the use of the whole funeral motif), or even plain old red herrings. i think part of the point is to keep you guessing. i guess it's an old pasttime, and sometimes fun, but i don't really feel the need to impose a unity on the song that isn't necessarily there.

in other worse, what "peepee" said.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Friday, 18 February 2005 23:10 (5 years ago) Permalink

in other *words* obviously

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Friday, 18 February 2005 23:10 (5 years ago) Permalink

ok what i meant to write is that i think some of the stuff in here (like the permutations of the funeral motif) are deliberately misleading.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Friday, 18 February 2005 23:11 (5 years ago) Permalink

2 years pass...

Ed's reading of this amazing song is right for me. I agree with Amateurist that the vagueness of the lyric creates the song's devastating effect, but in the end, the clues are all there, and it boils down to a pretty straightforward story (no less heartbreaking for that).

As far as the funeral motif goes, my own take on this is that Gram switches from a third person account, to speaking from a first person perspective, *as the groom*, at the end of each verse. The groom is deeply confused (and possibly drunk), and he has just seen his wedding turn into a funeral (in as much as everyone feels that way). Hence 'supposed to be a funeral, its been a bad bad day'.

Note too, that the lyrics also move freely in *time*, between a past-tense, retrospective, factual, third-person perspective ('It was a $1000 wedding supposed to be held the other day /And with all the invitations sent/The young bride went away/When the groom saw people passing notes/Not unusual, he might say') and the first person, present tense ('But where are the flowers for my baby/I'd even like to see her mean old mama/And why ain't there a funeral, if you're gonna act that way'), where the groom speaks directly to us as if we were wedding guests.

I'd even venture that Gram switches to a weird, new perspective with these lines: 'So why don't someone here just spike his drink/Why don't you do him in some old way/Supposed to be a funeral/It's been a bad, bad day'. I don't think there's a name for this perspective, but for me he is still speaking from the groom's perspective, despite his use of the third person, which to me, suggests that the groom has become disassociated from himself (he is drunk, and is speaking of himself in the third person, perhaps because he 'no longer feels like himself'). A more literal reading would be that Gram is suggesting that *he* (Gram) thinks someone should kill the groom, to put him out of his misery. But this makes less sense to me (where is Gram at this point in the 'narrative'? Sitting drinking with the groom? Or observing the groom and his buddies? Perhaps he identifies with the groom to such an extent that he feels entitled to suggest killing him, out of pity: it's not the sort of thing that most people would suggest as a remedy for another person, but its exactly the sort of thing someone might say about himself). Suffice to say, that at this point, Gram has 'become' the groom, to the extent that he 'speaks for him', if he is not actually singing the groom's own words.

The last verse is more surreal, and I can't really explain it as such, but it piles on a lot of imagery very effectively. The beast beaing put to sleep could be the groom, or the groom's pain: recalling someone spiking his drink and doing him in. The reverend has a different palliative (the singing of the saints), but the intention is the same.

At the end, we are left with the bald fact that the bride didn't want to get married, because she 'loved the world', which also suggests that the wedding might well have been *her* funeral (at least metaphorically), had she gone through with it.

― Richard Graham, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 12:40 (3 years ago) Permalink

several people have mentioned emmylou, but isn't it Linda Ronstadt who is singing the background vocals? or is it both? i mean, some of those notes are just too powerful sounding for emmylou. they sound more like ronstadt cause she has that cannon for a voice.

― QuantumNoise, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 13:35 (3 years ago) Permalink

No, it's Emmylour. Ronstadt only sang on In My Hour of Darkness I think.

― Stew, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 14:47 (3 years ago) Permalink

has anyone ever heard the supposedly 8-10 minute piano demo of this song? am I dreaming up the existence of such a thing? i think i read about it being on a bootleg sometime. and it didn't show up on the GP box set they put out last year.

― tylerw, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 14:55 (3 years ago) Permalink

Supposing it was the bride that died?

― Mark G, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 15:15 (3 years ago) Permalink

I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem as though the bride died at all. Just went away. And es hurt's reading seems the most OTM so far.

POV is basically that of the groom, presented by an only slightly distanced third-person narrator. Mostly dispassionate, but occasionally breaking through to a nearly first-person identification with his emotions ("So why don't someone here just spike his drink / Why don't you do him in some old way" and "And where are the flowers for the girl / She only knew she loved the world / And why ain't there one lonely horn and one sad note to play").

We dont' know anything about the "old lies" that the groom sees on his friend's faces. I assume she slept around, simply becayse it explains and gives a nice spin to line about loving the world.

In asking "Where are the flowers for the girl," the groom is really asking why she isn't dead. If he feels so miserable, if everybody feels so miserable, why isn't she lying in a box? Thus, the seeming empathy in the following line ("She only knew she loved the world") is just black humor. An accusation of infidelity presented as the sort of thing you might say in a speech about the deceased.

― Pye Poudre, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 15:35 (3 years ago) Permalink

By that last paragraph, I mean that the groom is asking this: "how come the b***h ain't dead?" He's not just making the observation that it feels more like a funeral than a wedding, he's coming very close to demanding that she actually be dead.

― Pye Poudre, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 15:42 (3 years ago) Permalink

I like the Faulkner analogy - use of the untrustworthy narrator. Gram's changing of point-of-view, with the disorientation of the narrator gives this song its trippy quality, and its power.

So why was this thread idle for 2 years, then suddenly active? Weird.

― Barringer, Thursday, 22 March 2007 14:36 (3 years ago) Permalink

It's a bit like the Sex Pistols' "Bodies" then!

― Mark G, Thursday, 22 March 2007 14:48 (3 years ago) Permalink

I always thought the girl died but now after reading all this I'm not so sure ... "she only knew she loved the world" I thought was talking about her sinning (in contrast to the rev's sermon) maybe to the point of fatality (kind of like Uncle Tupelo's line "too much living is no way to die")

Hey can we do "One Hundred Years From Now" next???

I want to know what kind of trouble we're in...

now THAT one I think is about a drug deal gone bad

oh no wait! I'm thinking of "Nothing Was Delivered"

― dmr, Thursday, 22 March 2007 14:56 (3 years ago) Permalink

No, it's Emmylour. Ronstadt only sang on In My Hour of Darkness I think.

yes! thanks for the clarification. i was confusing the two.

funny someone should wonder why a thread revival. i don't know why, but the revival of this thread has coincided why my revived interest in Gram. I dug him so hard in college, and then for years, I said he was overrated. But now I'm coming back around. I don't think he's the seconid coming (like I did when I was 19), but damn, he made some great music.

― QuantumNoise, Thursday, 22 March 2007 14:59 (3 years ago) Permalink

Why this thread woke up after a two year sleep... I was looking for some discussion on $1000 Wedding, which I've just 'discovered' (along with GP himself) and I love to bits. It's definitely my fave lump-in-throat tune now, replacing even 'For No One', which I've loved since I was a kid.
I found this website, which I also didn't know about. And I thought the discussion was really interesting, so thought I'd add my 2c worth.

― Richard Graham, Thursday, 22 March 2007 17:03 (3 years ago) Permalink

1 month passes...

i need to listen to this song again, and i admit to not always quite "knowing" what gram was on about lyrics-wise, but oh what great music

― gershy, Friday, 18 May 2007 07:18 (3 years ago) Permalink

4 weeks pass...

And as to a line no one else addressed:

"And why ain't there one lonely horn and one sad note to play"

The grieving process--perhaps this song itself--is about coming to this place or this perspective, summing it up and moving on. Grief and emotions (at least according to Sartre) were about not being about to put things in perspective. Grief is a response to something we have not figured out how to respond to. I think this song was highly personal to Parsons (he went through something like it himself) and this is a result of long years commiserating over it.

― rbslo, Saturday, 16 June 2007 19:01 (3 years ago) Permalink

I believe that's a reference to Kierkegaard's Repetition:

The young man sank down sadly
Bright tears from his eyes did rain
He sat him down upon a stone
And his heart it broke in twain
Long live the post-horn! It is my kind of instrument for many reasons, but mainly because you can never be sure of getting the same note out of it twice... If oyu give your friends post horns instead of an answer, you will have told them nothing but explained everything. Praised be the post-horn!

Parsons studied Kierkegaard at Harvard.

― eater, Saturday, 16 June 2007 19:15 (3 years ago) Permalink

1 month passes...

I mean, yeah, wow, Jesus Christ. This song is absolutely killing me lately.

i've always loved this song, it reads like Faulkner.

That's gotta be why I like it so much. The religious shift in the third verse is hell of Faulknerian.

Is there ANY other country music with lyrics that can be "read" to this extent? The Flatlanders come close but this song is like totally in a class of its own.

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, 15 August 2007 19:18 (3 years ago) Permalink

"I hate to tell you how he acted when the news arrived
He took some friends out drinking and
It's lucky they survived"

^love that part

― bnw, Wednesday, 15 August 2007 19:44 (3 years ago) Permalink

2 months pass...

Here's my $1000 worth - one way to look at it.

He's waiting at the altar and the atmosphere isn't right - "Well, why ain't there a funeral, if you're gonna act that way?" He's the last to know that his bride isn't going to show, and when he finds out, he tries to drink her off his mind.

But after pouring out his soul, he finds out that his friends are somehow involved - the final kick in the teeth. If the whole world's against him, someone might as well just do him in. This was supposed to be the 'funeral of his wedding' but instead he finds that he’s been betrayed by his friends.

Now cut to what would appear to be her actual funeral - we can't know how long after - and the only person that seems to have forgiven her is the protagonist. Everyone else feels some kind of shame or guilt relating to her; no one’s even concerned about her at all: “where are the flowers for the girl?” They’re busy dwelling on their individual mistakes or hers, when they should be together in their sadness: "why ain't there one lonely horn and one sad note to play?"

In all the situations, people are tangled up in their guilt instead of offering their sympathy or sharing their feelings.

That's how it seems to me, more or less.

I’d never analysed the narrative of this one in great depth before – I was always intrigued by the fact that he sings “It’s supposed to be a funeral” when it was clearly supposed to be a wedding. And I love the fact that the flowers for the girl come into it twice. I guess you can read it slightly differently to the way I’ve described above but really the specific details are unimportant. It’s an incredible song.

― andysz, Saturday, 27 October 2007 11:20 (2 years ago) Permalink

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