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preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead ¤ milky moon ¤ • View topic - No Provenance
Clearly there is something about 'no provenance' I am missing. I'm not much of a lyrics guy--is that it? Because although the song is beautiful... it's about two times longer than I need it to be.
No Provenance took a while for me, but it's actually one of the HOOM songs I listen to most now. I wouldn't say it's among my favorites, but it's really nice, if strange, little song. And the chord progression is actually pretty interesting. It goes a lot of places without seeming like it's going to a lot of places.
It's too late to be grateful It's too late to be late again It's too late to be hateful
I dunno, I still really don't dig it. Just doesn't work for me. And weirdly, that johnny appleseed line is one of the few that really stood out for me in the track, I love the contrast - one of America's founding myths recast into our modern, uber-surveilled society. The other line that always stood out was 'I burned safe and warm in your arms' - that's seriously beautiful. But a lot of the rest of the track I find wilfully wordy, a problem I don't really have with any other JN tracks.
the appleseed line is still crazy "opaque", as you'd put it. I take it as her questioning the foundations of her relationship and beliefs by questioning the mythical foundations of america, with the satellite acting as an omnipresent protector and educator but also a controller and watchman, but I still feel like I have to bend the meaning for that interp to work. on the face of it, "one of America's founding myths recast into our modern, uber-surveilled society" just doesn't seem to fit with the song, even if its a cool idea. as a reference I don't think it's established well enough and feels overly cryptic and tenuous in its relevance. there's also the matter that the whole line is a serious syllabic clusterfuck and feels overdone.
I still love the "leave a trail that leads/straight back down to the farm" part, though.
honestly I think no provenance is one of the lesser offenders as far as willful wordiness. Flying a Kite, Emily, Kingfisher etc. all exist.
The Johnny Appleseed line actually makes sense to me. She casts this man with whom she had a very close relationship in a new light, as this legendary character who basically wanders across the country planting his trees (or, you might say, spreading his seed). The idea of travelling and distance is a pretty big part of more than one song on HOOM ("In California," "Autumn" and "Occident" spring to mind), and the idea that she's asking this man to validate their relationship, which is now presumably over, via satellite feed only underlines the distance between them, which is in stark contrast to the repeated "in your arms" line.
It's too late to be grateful It's too late to be late again It's too late to be hateful
It's funny but No Provenance was one of the tracks I immediately got hooked to when the album came out, and was humming it all the time, but over time, it became the weakest track on HOOM for me as well.
I guess my interpretation of the line is unrelated to the rest of the track, so it'd be understandable if it didn't fit that much in context. I've never hugely taken to the track so I've never properly sat down with the lyrics, I guess I don't really know it well enough to even be discussing it here.
I disagree about Emily and Kingfisher being more grandiloquent (a ludicrous word itself) though, although there are a few offending words in each track (hydrocephalitic has really never worked for me), both tracks achieve an incredible beauty of meaning and language that No Provenance has never done whatsoever for me.
I really love No Provenance! I mean, I never think of this social commentary stuff in the lyrics, but I still love it.
It just has this way of going on, it's so soft and kind of ominous, it's like driving slowly along a road at night, it feels kind of like it might build up to some sort of climax like in her other songs but it never does, it's like you're always hanging on the edge. And the way she introduces images, it's like you're peeking through keyholes and spaces between trees at these slow scenes.
And he used to make me pray, wearing a mask like a death's head. When he put me there in the back seat, and he said, "Jesus save me, Jesus save me."
Maybe the fact that it's next to Good Intentions is part of what distracts me. I'll try it out tonight without listening to it in order and see if that helps! After the rollicking Good Intentions, and before the also-slow-burner Baby Birch, it always falls into the cracks.
haha it seems speculation always lands on Joanna's personal life in the end.
Just so you know, Smog's 1991 Floating EP contained a song called "Red Apples", and his 1997 Red Apple Falls LP (great album) contained both that song and and a newer title track.
Hey guys! So thanks to you, I am totally falling in love with this song. What I really love about it is the path it takes. Within each verse or chorus, the song can seem sort of simple (ish--its relative for joanna of course), but when you look at the whole thing, it's really interesting musically! The chord progressions between verse and chorus, and the way the whole attitude changes back and forth is really cool. I love the way the verse has this tense build into the chorus, but then it falls back down into the verse so easily. I think the lyrics and the music match up really well, too.
There are also some choice lyrics:
"You burned me like a barn / I burned safe and warm in your arms"
Too cute--and a feeling describe so well that I can relate to. This song is one where I can say I've had that feeling before.
I just wrote this big long thing about this song, because it's been rattling around my head for a while, but now I am blinking my eyes two hours later after flagrant procrastination, and it's all this strange, unorganized smear of words, and I didn't even get to the horse, or Johnny Appleseed! Well, I loved what everyone above had to say about No Provenance, and I'll offer this thought stew in case anyone else is also thinking about this song, as of late.
........
I love this song so very very much...
It feels to me like No Provenance is partly about the narrator abandoning her natural desire for self-determination because the challenges of being fully awake in the world seem impossible to meet (how do you handle being human when you have "no skin"?) - and therefore, she falls into the oblivion offered by her lover, the comfort and warmth of his protection, because she has none for herself, or she can't seem to locate it. All she wants is for him to pull over and hold her, until she can't remember her own name. We know from "Easy", that this relationship is doomed from the start, because he's not fully invested, and won't really open his heart and let her love him all the way, while she intends to love him anyway, being willfully blind to his nature as a rambling man who is always courting and never committing. She's in a frenzy of self-delusion, picking every daisy clean, trying to ignore the truth of the situation, because... ? Perhaps she has put all her eggs in this basket, pinned all her hopes on the transformative, redemptive possibilities of this love as the fulcrum on which she will save herself, and him (changing the fate of Two), and the world, the whole damn show. We know that the larger world is, in her perspective, off in some fundamental way - the far-off flares of Rome burning, the dragging flag (the strange tilting nation with the road laid down by the Good Intentions Paving Co. running through it), and the universe, itself, is getting loose, coming apart. But the price of buying into the self-created mythology about their love affair is that she must exist in a sort of purgatory, always waiting for him to love her back, pouring out more and more of herself in order to bring him around to being as fully open with her as she is (or says she wants to be) with him. By the end of the first song, she's already become a shadow of herself, just an apparition who can come when she's called. I love how the lie is there right in the title of the first song on the album - sure, they're resting in bed together, easy, perhaps even in love, but they are also caught in a web of entirely, epically uneasy things. It's also interesting that, starting here and continuing throughout the album, she keeps prodding him to let her love him, to tell her his worries, but when she wanders into his "terrible room", she is legitimately disturbed and freaked out by what she finds there. He probably sensed from the beginning that she was seeing what she wanted to see in him, and so for a while he kept her safely unawares of various truths - even if real love was present in some form, they were both using each other from the beginning, indulging in a devastatingly costly intoxication.
I like how No Provenance sounds sort of like a Renaissance-era ballad of unrequited love... like Greensleeves, with a fairy tale feeling running through it. The sense of having been very deeply ensorcelled - sleeping for forty years - and, yet, again, being complicit in the sorcery: burning safe and warm, willingly - she "died happy". It makes me think of Rip Van Winkle or other stories of people being led off by strange characters, and returning to the world to find that a great deal of time has passed in their absence, or simply the confusion and lostness of waking up in the everyday world after having visited a very different reality. Like "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", where the knight says, "And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side." That first line sounds like the narrator of this song, although she wakes to find herself gone.
The song is so heavy, and redolent with a terrible sense of sin - that by having been a partner in this private conflagration of blissful oblivion, she's abandoned a post she was meant to keep - a duty to stay engaged in her own story, awake within her life and awake to the health of her spirit, and to remain alert and able to respond to what's happening in the wider world. Instead, they took their ride, so that there was no one home - which either seems causative of the fall of Rome, or simply a dereliction of duty, during which he shielded her from seeing the signal flares calling for help. (The flares could be sent up from her own psyche, her friends and family, and/or her faltering civilization - the damning madness of the Bush years here in America is something that seems to me to be sort of in the background of this album. I definitely see a slide into unconsciousness, and a retreat from engaged citizenship into a sort of shell-shocked indulgence in comfort and illusions of safety as characteristic of that time period here... not that these problems and others didn't exist before and after, but that time seemed markedly horrific in its atrocity and denial.) In their private world (in their quiet hour), she and her lover are somehow capable of the miraculous - spinning gold clear out of straw (I tend to think of that "gold" as being maybe romantic or sexual ecstasy - like, this incredible sense of union somehow spun out of this very unsolid, uncohesive, and highly flammable substance of their relationship), but, again, at what cost? It feels like they broke some kind of natural law, even if they "weren't informed" of it. (I like that line, because it points to a certain reality-bending potential in being ignorant of the rules, but at the same time you get a sense that their ignorance has no bearing on their ultimately having to pay for their actions. "But, officer, I wasn't informed...!") In the Rumplestiltskin story, the cost of this magic trick was very high - the woman's firstborn child. (The next song is Baby Birch.) The woman in Rumplestiltskin is afraid of the Big Return of this imp, who will come to claim her baby. The Big Return seems to be like the Day of Judgement, when they will have to harvest what they have sown, both in the personal and collective sphere... makes me think of judgements, or fears of a judgement day, in other songs - the "tsk, tsk, tsk" of the rain on the lawns, and being accused of "pleasure-seeking" in Autumn; everyone "fearing God like a mistress" in Esme, "hey, hey, hey, the End is Near" in On a Good Day, being caught in the act of (confused) thievery and delivered to the gallows in You and Me, Bess, "My mama may be ashamed of me, with all of my finery" in Ribbon Bows, and the whole apocalyptic, Judgement Day theme of Kingfisher. And then there are the proclamations to the contrary - "I believe in innocence", "the unending amends you've made are enough for one life, be done", "kindness prevails", "There's a flame that moves like a low-down pest and says, You will be free".