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activatebutterflyshield · 7 months

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Something something the album Coyote Stories by The Crane Wives is about the current objectively horrid state of the world and also a call to action on changing that.

Okay. Starting with “Keep You Safe”. Here, the singer starts out as a young adventuring child who is afraid of joining their friends in slightly dangerous games. They never joined in, too afraid to face the consequences. As they grow up, they get more and more scared of the world as they see more and more slightly dangerous things happening around them. The refrain is a mantra that “Time is not your friend / Time is not your remedy / No amount of waiting will make you, make you brave / No amount of fear will keep you / No amount of fear will keep you safe”. The singer in this song is symbolic of the current state of the world, with so many people afraid of what is to come. The fears keep on piling up, from climate change to war to so many other things, and the people stay afraid, but they never grow any safer by being afraid. Time can and will march on, and, as the song says, “Come what may”.

Going on to “The Moon Will Sing”. The singer speaks of an unfulfilling relationship, with someone or something that keeps on leading them on but never fulfilling their promises. They mindlessly follow the something, and quietly ignored their neglected heart for a time. The chorus is “The moon will sing a song for me / I loved you like the sun / Bore the shadows that you made / With no light of my own”, in which the singer is lamenting their neglected state, but is also speaking of it in the past tense. They’ve moved on now, and are recalling the unhappy past. The singer in this case still represents the state of the world, but of a slightly altered state. They used to be in a bad place, but they’ve changed for the better, reflecting how the world has started to shift for the better. We’ve caught sight of our sorry state and are trying to remedy that.

Next is “Allies or Enemies”. This one is blunt and very personal. The singer immediately references “wildfires and weeds”, as well as an “awful damn disease”, all of which are rather familiar to 21st century Homo sapiens as omnipresent news headlines in the backgrounds and foregrounds of our lives. We are intertwined with these tragedies just as the singer is intertwined with the subject of their song, to the point that neither can conceive of a world without the tragedy or the subject. Anything and everything may or may not happen, as “All is fair in love and war”, but if this dynamic keeps up, it will be “the death of me”.

“Unraveling” is mostly a heaping pile of metaphors and symbolism. The singer is lamenting their lost loves, people who seemed to care for them before disappearing without a word. Though these men were kind and seemed to help, each and every one would eventually disappear and leave the singer worse for wear. Perhaps the best line to be applied to the world’s current state is the one about the carpenter: “Sanded my rough edges, crafted new and lovely things / But now my love is gone / And I can’t help the fracturing”. The carpenter represents the groups and people who have shepherded the world into its current state, keeping the population complacent by plying them with pretty little gifts and things to distract them while profiting all they can. But as soon as the carpenter has gotten what they wanted, they leave the world to its own devices to deal with the consequences of their profiteering. These profiteers are partially the ones at fault for the current state of the world.

“Hard Sell” does, in fact, hit hard. The singer is clearly going through something rough, holding themself together through sheer will to live. They’re trying so hard to get better, but it’s so hard to improve that it seems that they’re “working with barbed wire and moth wings”. To go on a tangent, the decision to specifically say “moth wings” and not bird or fly wings evokes (in my biology-addled brain) the image of salt and pepper moths. These are moths that rapidly evolved to have darker coloration thanks to the sooty, polluted conditions of the Industrial Revolution. The singer is using the only things they have: a metal material designed to harm and keep out and the wings of an animal greatly impacted by human-spurred climate change, and they’re lamenting that it seems that everyone might be going through the same thing. And its true; we’re all facing the same consequences of the state of the world in one form or another, and the only difference is how we present ourselves to the rest of the victims out there. We’re all affected, and we all need to “stop pretending now” and get something done.

Finally made it to “Rockslide”, the song that got me down this track in the first place. It has a runaway rhythm with a singer that speaks of feeling the “wild weather” that’s “got the mountain shaking weak”, and of the “quaking” of “rocks … a’tumblin while the people are asleep”. That wild weather is all the rapid and negative changes rocking the world, or the mountain. And the rocks are the consequences crashing towards the people so ignorant they might as well be asleep. Though the singer prays that they might keep their soul and that “you”, whom they’re singing to, wants to settle down, they also acknowledge that they must run or “the devil we will meet”. The people of the world must run, or make changes, else they’ll face the horrible consequences, or the devil. The devil, or “monster”, is coming and does not care what it hits.

On to “Metaphor”. Oh boy, “Metaphor”. The singer here is someone broken, jaded, the sort of person who’s been hurt ten too many times. They are a liar, a scavenger, a (metaphorical) killer. “You can’t trust a single thing I say”, they sing, because they’ve been lied to and forced to survive in the corners and the margins of the world. They are loud, they are hurt, and by goodness do they not want to go through that again. I really shouldn’t have to say why this is all to real to so many people in this world. They’re the ugly, hard to look at truth of the world, the headline you’re afraid to finish reading, the words just a little too raw to be fake. “I’ve gotten good at making up metaphors”, they sing, because that truth is too hard to bear without at least a little bit of sugarcoating.

Now comes “The Hand That Feeds”. Do I really need to explain this one? “I’ve seen good men spoiled / Chained to their jobs like hounds / They work and sleep, and work again / In the darkest nights they howl”. The people of the world, those who by all measures should not suffer, are chained and bound, deprived of freedom beyond their desperate laments. This is the fate the singer’s father wants his child to avoid, the snare he wishes them to see and remain free of. They sing of how “He taught me that the hand that feeds / Deserves to be bitten when it beats”. No matter how good it looks, you should never take the deal. Never shake the hand of the devil, despite his honeyed words, and remain your own self. That hand only wants to drag you down deeper.

Next is “Little Soldiers”. Okay when I started writing this thing I had just finished All Quiet on the Western Front and so I had a lot of sad war metaphors about this one, but it’s been a while and most of them have vacated my brain in the meantime, so… here goes. “On the broken backs of all the words we spared” they sing, “Like little soldiers in the trenches / It was a march we made towards ruin and despair / but we held hands all the while”. The singer here is recovering from a horrible loss, of the ending of a relationship they thought was good and healthy, but in reality was false to both parties. Both the singer and their former partner are representative of the common suffering of the common people, of their past struggles and strife, and how, in the end, they banded together to fight for each other. The refrain reflects this bittersweet dynamic, switching between “I swear that I loved you” and “I swear that you loved me”. The common love was the only good thing in the lives of the partners, and is all they can look back to in the end.

Following is “Sleeping Giants”, with a return to a feel similar to that of “Rockslide”, as forces beyond mortal comprehension threaten to wake. “I feel the mountains / Shifting under me / The sleeping giants are finally waking”. The singer is hyper aware that they are in danger, and said danger is something so alien, so powerful, and as unexpected as the land itself was shifting beneath their feet. Their pulse is racing, they are in fight-or-flight as all those prophecies from the previous songs in the album begin to come true. “The moon is humming / Lovely melodies / The forest echos, the trees are crowing / Hungry, hungry harmonies”. Natural keystones as far separated as the trees on the Earth and the moon in the sky are calling out in tandem, something is wrong. Something is terribly, horribly wrong.

A rather abrupt tone shift as “Of Everlong” follows. It’s a very short song, barely more than a minute, and its poetry is perhaps the strongest. I’ll just write the whole thing here.

“Out of the ocean / Over the harbor / Lay no sons and / Lay no daughters / Among the mountains of everlong / Twas there I wrote me / A sad, sad song / And if my lover / Will not hear it / Take my voice and / Take my spirit / Leave me weakened / And dig my hole / Only my lover not I can keep my soul / Only my lover not I can keep my soul”.

The singer, a lover much like the one mentioned in “Little Soldiers”, is singing a lament that they are alone, here in the mountains of everlong, beyond all reach of other people. Here they sing of what they have lost, or perhaps never had, a tune that can only echo about those mountains and never reach beyond the ocean. They declare that they’d rather die than never see their beloved again, consigning themself to eternal loneliness rather than risk breaking their heart all over again. Theirs is a song of what was and what will never be, of a world of memories that was long taken by the mists and will never emerge from the horizon with the breaking dawn.

It stays melancholy with “Never Love an Anchor”, with a rocking rhythm like a ship in a calm sea, and a singer who laments that they were never enough for their beloved. They were unable to care for their child, their spark of light impossibly kindled in a life made of sorrow, and feel that it is all their fault. “And I tried to do the best that I could / But try as I might I couldn’t bring myself to hold you”, they cry, a gentle, quiet admittance of defeat. They knew that they could never be enough, and so gave a chance to their beloved in exchange for defying their own selfish desires. This singer acted for the good of the many rather than the good of the few, giving what hope they did have to the little one so that they may rise just a bit higher. “On some level, I think I always understood / That a ship could never really love an anchor”, they sing, an admittance of their own failings, and a declaration that their beloved will be better, will have some brighter future, some breaking dawn at the horizon to look forward to.

The final song of the album is “New Discovery”. It’s a final declaration of the singer’s hope for a brighter future, of some true and real goal that they might strive for. It may not be real, it may be a mirage, but by goodness will they bite and claw and fight for it. “I want to believe / There’s something left for me / A new discovery”. It’s a hope, a faraway paradise, an impossible pipe dream, but it’s something. And to a person at the very end of their rope, to those who might sing of their trials and tribulations and torments and tragedies, something can be everything. It doesn’t need to be grand, or golden, or even great. It just needs to be better. And that is something everyone should be able to get behind.

Hope is famously that thing with feathers, the creature at the bottom of Pandora’s box, the last feeling humanity will ever have. It will drive us on through the deep, dark night, be our guiding lantern in the shadow of the dragon, and when we see the light of the sun shatter over the eastern horizon, we’ll think, yes. One more day. One more day to live and to learn, one more chance at making things better. There will always be nights; times of death and destruction will come again and again for the foreseeable future. But the night is always followed by the day, by hope and a new chance to take another step towards a better future.

Never stop fighting to see that next dawn, to once again behold the sun declaring that a new day has risen.

Never stop working to make things better.

#the crane wives #coyote stories #music #me running my mouth #media analysis #hopepunk #hopecore #optimism #i should think ive earned the right to tag those tags since i desperately tried to make this as uplifting as possible #idk mates i just think humanity could use a bright dawn sometime soon #i managed to drag in sooooooo many bloody metaphors #most of them are from the oh hellos unsurprisingly #especially the whole night is always followed by the day thing featured in their four winds #i will write a thing on through the deep dark valley i swear

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