Stephen Dame Wrote:skippy the wonder dog Wrote:Her biographical details have nothing to do with the words in the song, they're just noise.
Who said they did?
Well, she did, actually. She insisted that there was a "correct" meaning to the songs, and they were about her.
Stephen Dame Wrote:Beyond that, your aversion to people delving into the songs, bibliographically or otherwise, has always puzzled me. They're not your songs, everyone enjoys them differently.
Sure. But I have an opinion on the matter, too. So if people want to theorize that "Fire in the Hole" is about Gord Downie's unfortunate experience with Bobby Baker's chile on the 3rd of May, 1993, on the basis of something they heard from their brother's friend's friend's cousin, who was the plumber involved, and an offhand comment dropped by Gord at a concert in Medicine Hat that somebody happened to tape, well, I might express my point of view that the songs are the songs, and what you seek is in the songs, not elsewhere.
I've never expressed a hostility to individual interpretations. That's hogwash that you like to throw out to defend what I'm really criticizing, which is the A.J. Weberman approach of going through the band's garbage looking for clues.
Simply put, I think it's silly to pick up external references, such as things Gord Downie once said or an elaborate examination of what happened to the Bismarck, build an idea of what a song is "about" based on that, and then try to shoehorn the lyrics into that meaning.
Similarly, it's silly to assume that a song must refer to actual events in the songwriter's life. That's like theorizing that Margaret Atwood was a handmaid in some obscure theocracy somewhere.
Those are actually attempts to hang single, concrete "meanings" on songs.
I'm encouraging people to look in the lyrics themselves. Everything you're looking for is in there. And that's the approach that actually allows things to remain ambiguous.
