Phosphorescent: Song for Zula

A few weeks ago I was up at dawn up in northern Wisconsin and you know, if you know me at all, that if I am up at dawn it’s only because I haven’t slept. Right before I’d gone up there I’d loaded a bunch of new music onto my MP3 player and while I was standing there shivering, this song, which I had never heard before, came on.

I highly recommend listening to it when you’re on the edge of something – a lake, a cliff, a decision.

My heart is wild / my bones are steam / and I could kill you with my bare hands / if I was free

It was a very cold, very bright sunrise that morning, and all the gray of this long Wisconsin winter only turned to silver, not to color, as the sun came up, but it was still astonishing.

2 Replies to “Phosphorescent: Song for Zula”

  1. i’m going to add this, which i foudn here:
    http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/14661-song-for-zula/

    On “Song For Zula,” off of the upcoming Muchacho, he sounds like he’s died and woken up on an unknown shoreline somewhere. The sound is bigger, airier, and more mysterious than anything the band’s ever done. Lightly skirling violin lines and gull-cry synths circle above, and silvery threads of pedal-steel guitar waft gently by. He opens with a mumbled quote from Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and then spins out a difficult-to-parse, metaphysical-feeling tale of abjection (“I lay my face to the salt”) and throwing off offered support: (“You will not see me fall/or see me struggle to stand/To be acknowledged by some touch from his gnarled hands.”) It is a stunning piece of music; it sounds like an allegory, like a dream.

  2. & the correct lyrics, from here:
    http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107859446956/

    Some say love is a burning thing
    That it makes a fiery ring
    Oh but I know love as a fading thing
    Just as fickle as a feather in a stream
    See, honey, I saw love, you see it came to me
    It puts its face up to my face so I could see
    Yeah then I saw love disfigure me
    Into something I am not recognizing

    See the cage, it called…I said, come on in
    I will not open myself up this way again
    Nor lay my face to the soil, nor my teeth to the sand
    I will not lay like this for days now upon end
    You will not see me fall, nor see me struggle to stand
    To be acknowledged by some touch from his gnarled hands
    You see the cage, it called…I said, come on in
    I will not open myself this way again

    You see the moon is bright in that treetop night
    I see the shadows that we cast in the cold clean light
    My feet are gold and my heart is white
    And we race right out on the desert plains all night
    See honey I am not some broken thing
    I do not lay in the dark waiting for thee
    No my heart is gold, my feet are light
    And I am racing out on the desert plains all night

    So some say love is a burning thing
    That it makes a fiery ring
    Ah but I know love as a caging thing
    Just a killer come to call from some awful dream
    O and all you folks, you come to see
    You just to stand there in the glass looking at me
    But my heart is wild and my bones are steam
    And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free

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