Some songs just lodge in the memory, and this from Wilco is a case in point. Initially I disregarded it cutting it off from my cherry picked selection of songs from its album, "A Ghost Is Born, which I deemed "fit" for my mp3 player.However, years later I rediscovered the song and it spoke to me in a way it hadn't before; revealing subtleties and meaning I perhaps wasn't able to appreciate on first picking up the album.
It has got a fairly plodding Beatlesy piano melody, though as is Wilco's wont, the lyrics steal the show. They catapult the song from the mediocre to the magnificent. There is something indubitably moving about Tweedy's words. "I'm an ocean, I'm all emotion" he sings, before noting, abstractedly, "I'm a cherry ghost." The latter image being an example of the expressionistic style of Tweedy's compositions, and so striking that a band decided to name themselves Cherry Ghost in homage.
Some songs you have to earn the right to being able to comprehend, and this is one. There seems to be an unfakeable, hard earned quality to it.
For, despite the lilting piano and major chord jocularity, the song carries a poignant, melancholy message. No one can map each other: our emotions are literally "oceans" undefinable, opaque to others, let alone "Theologians". We are ultimately, all alone and all there is to us is emotion and vagueness. Indeed the very fact of our cognisance of this makes it somehow tragic.
But we may as well have a jolly melody to back up such cheery sentiments, eh?
Wilco – Theologians
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