I don’t think I saw the video until I looked it up for this post. It’s cute and clever, if a bit distracting. I knew “Hourglass” from the radio — and from repeated plays once I got the album. I don’t think I was able to pull out all the words of the rapidly sung-chanted chorus until I had the album’s lyrics sheet. Then I trained myself to sing along. It was a little tricky. But I got it down!
Take it to the bridge
Throw it overboard
See if it can swim
Back in to the shore
No one’s in the house
Everyone is out
All the lights are on
And the blinds are down
In my life many’s the time I needed to dance. Instrumentals are good, lyrics that are howled, crooned, chanted, rasped — all good. The beat in “Hourglass” is good for the hot foot. But in this case the lyrics are a big part of the attraction. According to an interview at songfacts Chris Difford writes the lyrics; Glenn Tilbrook puts them to music. I find it hard to imagine writing lyrics without hearing a song already, so it’s interesting to me that the division of labor here is so sharp. Chris Difford, apparently, does not suggest a tune to begin with, he just hands over words. Glenn Tilbrook will go through pages of offered lyrics and put music to those that strike him. The process for “Hourglass” was more immediately collaborative than usual. “This was the first time we wrote together in the same room,” says Difford. “I'd always thought of writing as a bit like masturbation: something you do on your own, not in the same room as another bloke. However, … within an hour we'd written 'Hourglass.' Lyrically it doesn't mean much but we had some fun writing it.”
The song starts with that thumping drum and nasal horns bleating, then downshifts to some guitar plucking, punctuated by the horns, which sound more assertive now. After about 30 seconds, Tilbrook comes in with the vocal:
I feel like I'm pounding on a big door
No one can hear me knocking,
I feel like I'm falling flat to the floor
No one can catch me from falling
These are rather alienated lyrics. Unheard, unhelped, the voice, it seems, is also out of time:
The hourglass has no more grains of sand,
My watch has stopped no more turning hands
The crew have abandoned ship
The lights are on but no one is in
The stanza ends with a crewless ship where the lights still burn, a ghost ship, perhaps, adrift. Certainly this continues the alienation, the sense that the voice is alone and unnoticed. If the voice is the ship metaphorically, then the line echoes the joke about the person in a daze, The lights are on, but no one is home.
The fast-chanted chorus rushes right in without a pause. The narration is getting a little muddled. Is the ship being taken to the bridge where “it” is thrown overboard — or is “it” being thrown off the bridge? Isn’t one more likely to use “overboard” with a boat than a bridge? Is “it” alive? Nonliving things don’t swim, though swimming could be a way of referring to an object floating in with the tide. If “it” is alive, what is it? The house on shore is as abandoned as the ship, yet the house also is lit up, though with the circumspection of blinds being drawn, so an outsider wouldn’t really be able to tell the house is empty. Contra the cliche about lights being on and no one home, the blinds being drawn suggests introspection, or at least a conscious warding off of the inquiring eye. It interests me that the chorus’ rhymes are fairly subtle: “board/shore” and “out/down”. More subtle than “door/floor” and “shore/floor”. The choice makes the chanted chorus a little softer, a little easier to take.
In the next verse the voice is “calling on a telephone” but no one answers, and is “running up a steep hill” (Sisyphus-like?). Again, the timekeeping devices are dysfunctional, with the watch not stopped, no longer telling time, that is, but timelessly, cartoonishly alive — “shaking its fist” with a “face [that] is hanging out on a spring.” The video for the song really plays up the objects as anarchic, the singer’s (band’s) situation as beyond the realm of the world where people can touch and help each other.
Most the singing is easy to make out, but that line about the face on a spring gets lost among the instruments.
The mood of the lyrics is not upbeat, but the singing is assertive and the music full of spring, especially with those blasts of horn.
The final stanza echoes back to the first with the “or” rhymes and the singer’s attempts to attract attention. The abandoned ship seems still to have one person on it, though no one beyond the ship sees, and no one on shore responds to the voice calling out. The song concludes with a pratfall, a repeat from the first stanza, a fall which is sad and humorous, and a little bit scary. There’s a sense not only that the singer is “falling” and won’t be caught before hitting the floor, but that the falling is ongoing. A free-fall that never comes to earth is a special kind of alienation, isn’t it?
It’s a fun song to dance to. The haunted house/boat the singer describes but seems almost contented with helped me identify with the song personally. I was feeling lonely and abandoned, too, but if the only one there to dance with was my own self, well, I was going to dance with him.
source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987
No comments:
Post a Comment