#the whole devil album

[hoforwonho]

Sliding RBW a $5 bill

Please… OT5 Luna…. I need it more than air

[maybeinanotherworld]

no because listening to the amazing devil literally unlocks shrimp emotions in my brain, how on earth do i listen to "and i'll blink like ripping envelopes in the hopes that you'll write back" and move on with my day what the fuck-

[spicywreck]

dirty laundry by bitter:sweet is such a fun devil's minion song set in night island

[eccentrichumanbeing69]

This reminds me of kanej

[gracebethartacc]

whole!cj with C1 would be so silly

MY MIND'S PLAYING TRICKS ON ME! IT KEEPS ON SHOWING ME THE THINGS THAT I COULD'VE BEEN, LIKE SOMEONE WHO ADORES DUALITY (DO YOU HEAR ME!?)

[doyouknowthemossinman]

CAVETOWN ROCK ALBUM WHEN.

[whatshehassaid]

This is SUCH a young Daniel/Armand song FUCK ME U P TAYLOR SWIFT

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: January 7

"Devil Put the Coal in the Ground" by Steve Earle

[fallen-goldfishcracker]

not to be sappy on main but like

I wanna sit with you and have healthy conversations/ our wants, our wills, our trials and tribulations/ sort through faults and fears, the happier years/ let the smiles be the tears replacement

[burning-thistle]

"Don't you think I look pretty curled up on this bathroom floor?" and "Sometimes I fall to pieces just to see what bits of me don't fit" are some of my favorite lyrics EVER

[sadhorsegirl]

[valleygirlfag]

This song changed my brain chemistry

[kingthunder]

The Calling and how it’s possibly related to Secret Worlds and Chords

So let’s talk about Ruin (again) and one possible interpretation of The Calling and how it’s related to both Secret Worlds and Chords.

In Secret Worlds, we have two people (the lover (Joey) and the daughter (Madeleine)) being young and wild. Fire imagery is repeated constantly, especially in relation to the daughter. The lover asks for a light, and she gives him her fire—not a literal flame, but her essence, the life burning inside her. “Just watch me burn,” she says.

At the end of the song, the instrumentation moves seamlessly into the intro of The Calling, the first indication that these two songs are linked. Right away we meet a woman who used to be “dauntless” and “burn so bright,” who’s coming to the river to wring the last of her embers out—this is the daughter from Secret Worlds. Only something has happened, there’s “something changed” (the line from Secret Worlds where they’re fearful about the future). But what is it? We’re wondering that, and so is she, as she looks at herself in the water. “Who’s this? What changed?”

It becomes clear that there’s a relationship in The Calling that caused a lot of pain and brought the daughter to this place of desolation. Initially I wondered if it was the romance begun in Secret Worlds, but there are some other lines here that make me suspect something different is going on.

I think it’s about a woman who was emotionally abused (whether intentionally or not) by her mother. And here’s why:

 First, looking at her face and seeing an “unwanted daughter.” Then the line, “You’ll never get your dinner if you don’t learn how to get along”—I don’t think she’s saying this to someone, I think this is her parroting back a line that was said to her, over and over, something a controlling parent would say to her feisty (firey) daughter. And one of the kickers to me: “And when I think I’m fine you’ll visit, And then you happen to me, you happen to me all over again.” Why would an ex visit, and not just once, but multiple times as this line seems to indicate? Because it’s not an ex, it’s her mother, who feels entitled to drop by whenever she wants, whether her daughter wants it or not.

So, what form did this abuse take, and what has it done to her?

If the daughter is fire, the mother is water. The mother has been trying to dictate her daughter’s life and force her onto a path that she doesn’t want. And the daughter tried to please her mother, she “really fucking tried,” but all that’s happened is that she’s managed to twist herself into someone she doesn’t even recognize anymore and doesn’t want to be. Her fire is being put out.

But she’s had enough! She’s ready to take her life back. To “shoulder the sky” and “open her [those] eyes” and see “how much she [you] can be.” But to do that, she first has to metaphorically drown that twisted reflection of herself that she’s become. “Do you like my dress? It’s got pockets,” she says, bitter amusement creeping into her voice, alluding to Virginia Woolf who went to the river to drown herself by putting rocks in her pockets. And then we “watch that woman drown” as her voice just absolutely soars—she’s finally cast off the person her mother wanted her to be, made her into. And how does this relate to Chords?

I think that Chords is the situation from the mother’s perspective.

The entire song is about a mother singing about how she fucked everything up while her partner assures her that hey it wasn’t that bad. But we see so many admissions from her—the “days she [I] couldn’t cope,” the drinks she needed, how her kids think she’s a “nightmare” and she “pushed them all” and had “no notion what to do,” and that she “raged so much (you did) but so did they.”

Then we get into the explicit: Go tell them how we failed you And gift to us all your blame Cos we’ll be all that you hate about yourself

and

Tell them that we never cared Go tell them how we fucked you up And oh my god it’s so unfair

And the mother (and her partner) tries to make herself feel better by saying it all came from a place of love and that the kids will be fine, but as we saw in The Calling, the daughter is Not Fine. She does blame her mother, she hates things about herself that are a direct result of her mother’s influence, she does feel fucked up.

“They are my rascals I can’t let them walk away,” the mother sings in Chords. In Secret Worlds, the daughter referred to herself as a “dirty rascal,” internalizing that derogatory term in a way that maybe her mother didn’t intend, but that did real harm anyway. The mother doesn’t want her kids to walk away—she drops by to “visit” her daughter (”when I think I’m fine you’ll visit”), smothering, not letting her daughter have enough space. And all the imagery in Chords is water—oceans, waves—in direct opposition to the daughter’s fire. The mother never understood her, this was doomed from the start.

“But Chords is about letting your kids go!” you might say. Well, yes, that’s what the parents are saying. But to me the entire thing reads as apologia for the parents, the mother and father sugarcoating their actions to downplay the family disharmony. “We let you move out to make it on your own!” they say, “Look what a good job we did!” But meanwhile dear old mom is dropping in on the kids whenever she damn well feels like it.

Whew!

(obviously this is only one possible interpretation of any of these songs, and particularly Chords, which is incredibly layered and nuanced and I could write another essay about)

Join me next time when I try to link “Pick your chords well, loves, but sing your notes off-key” (Chords) to “I play our song to see if it’s in tune” (Ruin) and then we see if this entire arc could possibly be read as some kind of trans narrative.

[carfuckerlynch]

i want to talk about that unwanted animal. can we talk about that unwanted animal now? i’ve been dying to talk about that unwanted animal

[demonlullaby]

the outro choreography for devil by the window actually showed me the gates of heaven

[virtuangel]

anyways this is for vyvy n vyvy only

farewell, neverland > sugar rush ride > devil by the window > tinnitus > happy fools