Over the next three days, Glorious Noise is excited to be publishing Max Heath’s intense examination of the music and lyrics in Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea.

Max Heath revised this article from a thesis originally written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Music at Wesleyan University in April, 2007. Max currently resides in Middletown, CT where he is a graduate student in composition at Wesleyan. He also actively writes, performs, produces, and records with several bands. Visit him on MySpace.

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With its fan base replenished almost

exclusively through word of mouth, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane

over the Sea is a compelling document that seems to bypass cognition,

achieving a strikingly direct emotional impact. Most of the discussion of the album

has centered on its transcendent capacity, but there has been surprisingly

little investigation of exactly how it achieves this effect. This is largely

due to the fact that analysis has been almost exclusively limited to brief

reviews. While there is a book about the album—Kim Cooper’s eponymous work of

2005—it is concerned largely with a factual documentation of the circumstances

surrounding the album’s conception, recording, and release.

Because of the

limitations of traditional alternative rock journalism, while discourse on Aeroplane‘s

basic themes and general aesthetic has been fairly extensive, in-depth

examination of its actual content has been avoided. Typically, reviewers have

justified this evasion by passing off the album’s lyrics as inscrutably

enigmatic, and its music as too simplistic to warrant a closer look. These

refrains, however, simply do not hold up with analysis. A comparison of the

lyrics with the diary of Anne Frank—a major influence on the album according to

principal songwriter Jeff Mangum—reveals a complex relationship between the two

texts, illuminating what initially seems hopelessly opaque. In the same way,

though the music is indeed harmonically simplistic in many ways, there are

distinct elements of songwriting, performance, arrangement, and production that

coalesce to manifest the weight of the album’s thematic content in a viscerally

affecting sound. But before examining the songs in greater detail, it is

useful to understand how Neutral Milk Hotel fits in with—and deviates from—its

influences and contemporaries.

To this day, Aeroplane

seems to evade context. It is an album full of anachronism and dislocation,

from its fantastical lyrics to its unusual instrumentation, culling together

disparate elements from traditional folk, circus, marching band, and rock

musics. But while the music evokes an experiential disconnection from time and

place, it can be understood as an extension of a diverse set of influences and,

to some extent, a reflection of the developing “lo-fi” aesthetic of the

catchall genre of “indie rock” in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The band’s influences

are clustered in both very traditional and very experimental idioms, with

apparently little in between. Its traditional influences are based in folk

music, chiefly its non-western forms. Jeff Mangum was particularly fascinated

by Bulgarian folk music, and his only new post-Aeroplane release was a

2001 compilation of field recordings of this music, entitled Orange Twin

Field Works: Volume I. Jeremy Barnes, Neutral Milk Hotel’s drummer,

emphasizes that an early appreciation of Eastern European folk led the band to

embrace all kinds of traditional folk music (Cooper, 2005). This ostensibly

accounts for the simple harmonic structure of most of the band’s songs. In

addition, Mangum professes a love of circus music, and its whimsical spirit is

prevalent in the band’s sound, especially in its often boisterous horn

arrangements (McGonigal, 1998).

Experimental and

avant-garde music has always played a role in Mangum’s composition. He

cultivated an early interest in abstract sound collages and tape loops in part

due to his admiration for the work of John Cage and Steve Reich (Cooper,

2005). His enduring appreciation of the music of Pierre Henry, Alain Savouret,

and Harry Partch reflects the impact of musique concrète,

electroacoustic music, and microtonality in Mangum’s musical development (Cost,

1998). Experimental jazz greatly informed the ensemble’s synergistic dynamic.

The band’s primary jazz reference points—John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Charlie Haden

and others—are artists from the 1960s and 1970s whose work helped advance jazz

to new extremes in structure, technique, and composition (Cooper, 2005). This

influence is manifested in the ensemble’s spontaneous, chaotic energy, as well

as a propensity for live improvisation.

Psychedelic rock from

artists such as the Zombies and Syd Barrett have also contributed to the band’s

frequently hazy aesthetic (Griffis, 2003). Producer Robert Schneider’s home

studio, where Aeroplane was recorded, was named in honor of the Beach

Boys’ landmark Pet Sounds. As a volunteer DJ for Louisiana Tech University’s radio station in the early 1990s, Mangum was also exposed to the burgeoning

lo-fi scene, courtesy of artists like Guided By Voices and Sebadoh (DeRogatis,

2003). Mangum and his friends shared with these artists a fondness for the

grainy sound of four-track recording. Though partly driven by necessity, these

artists also embraced the four-track for its ability to produce a warmer, more

idiosyncratic sound in contrast to the sterile polish of professional studio

recordings. Mangum explains: “There’s a certain way we’ve gotten used to

things sounding, after recording on four-track for years. There are certain

sounds we love to hear. All the heavy distortion stuff is intentional”

(McGonigal, 1998, p. 56).

Mangum honed his

four-track recording with the Elephant 6 collective, an intimate community of

friends and collaborators that may represent the most pervasive influence on

Neutral Milk Hotel’s sound. The collective sprang up out of the musical

friendship between Mangum, Robert Schneider, Will Cullen Hart, and Bill Doss,

and gradually grew to envelope a significant group of musicians united by an

affinity for lo-fi psychedelic aesthetics and an enthusiasm for sharing ideas

with one another. This cooperative artistic spirit was expressed largely

through tape-trading; members routinely produced a series of compositions and

mini-albums on cassette and circulated them throughout the collective.

Eventually Elephant 6 evolved into a sort of record label in spirit

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its logo often emblazoned upon each project produced by affiliated bands. Many

bands aside from Neutral Milk Hotel are associated with the collective,

including Olivia Tremor Control (Hart and Doss’s band), the Apples in Stereo

(Schneider’s band), Elf Power, and Of Montreal. The bands of Elephant 6 often

share members, but each explores a distinct sonic thrust. Mangum describes it

as “psychologically being together and then separately musically creating these

little worlds” (XFM Radio, 1998). Looking back on his tape-trading days with

the collective, Julian Koster—who would later join Neutral Milk Hotel—remarks:

I think what Elephant 6 meant for

us is very simple: there’s something pure and infinite in you, that wants

to come out of you, and can come out of no other person on the planet. That’s

what you’ve got to share, and that’s as real and important as the fact that

you’re alive. We were able, at a really young age, to somehow protect each

other so we could feel that. (Cooper, 2005, p. 104)

Through sharing living spaces and

trading ideas, members forged deep emotional bonds that informed their musical

development, collectively and individually.

Neutral Milk Hotel

emerged from this atmosphere as a pseudonym for Mangum’s songwriting. After a

slew of extremely lo-fi cassette-only releases in the early 1990s, Merge

Records released Neutral Milk Hotel’s official full-length debut, On Avery

Island, in 1996. This marked the first significant collaboration between

Mangum and producer Robert Schneider. Mangum sang and played most of the

instruments, while Schneider filled out arrangements and handled the

production. Here Schneider deferred to Mangum’s production requests almost

absolutely, resulting in a fairly raw sonic palette. Though a fine album, it

sounds somewhat flat alongside the much richer followup, which benefited

greatly from Schneider’s warm, vintage production techniques.

For the subsequent

tour, Mangum assembled a group of dedicated and like-minded musicians active

within Elephant 6—drummer Jeremy Barnes, horn player Scott Spillane, and

multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster—for what would eventually become the band’s

official lineup. Focusing their collective outside influences through the lens

of the Elephant 6 community spirit, the band spent the tour forming its

signature chaotic sound. By the time the ensuing relentless wave of recording

dates and concerts had subsided, over two years had passed and Neutral Milk

Hotel had virtually collapsed after conceiving its crucial statement: an album

called In the Aeroplane over the Sea.

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In the

Aeroplane Over the Sea can be divided into three main sections according to

the major shifts in its thematic terrain. The first section, consisting of the

first three tracks, broadly contextualizes the speaker and introduces many of

the album’s key themes.

Aeroplane

begins with a wildly diverse three-part suite. “King of Carrot Flowers Part 1″

opens the album, while parts two and three share the second track, but all

three songs serve a unified thematic vision. In this dramatic opening trio a

narrow set of harmonic and thematic material is filtered through three

dramatically different interpretations. All three share a 4/4 time signature,

the key of F major, and consist of various rearrangements of the same three

simple chords: F major, Bb major, and C major. But despite these similarities,

each is rendered markedly distinct by changes in tempo, arrangement, and sonic

texture.

“King of Carrot Flowers

Part 1″ begins with an unaccompanied, percussively strummed acoustic guitar

riff based around a I-V-IV progression. The upbeat guitar part is thick and

crisp, an effect achieved by layering two nearly identical performances over

one another through overdubbing. The bare triads are played on the lowest

strings of the guitar, establishing a narrow tonality. Mangum’s voice enters

with cryptic second-person reminiscence:

When you were young

You were the king of carrot flowers

And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees

In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your feet

His voice is double-tracked as

well, and the thickness of the doubled guitar and vocals creates a rich and

vaguely surreal sound.

The use of vocal

overdubbing in the context of this album is conceptually significant. Though

both Mangum and producer Rob Schneider had ample prior experience thickening

the sound of a vocal performance through this technique, Mangum began to

restrict his use of vocal doubling during the recording of the first Neutral

Milk Hotel album, On Avery Island. For that album he chose to forego

vocal double-tracking entirely in favor of a more natural sound (Cooper,

2005). For Aeroplane, Mangum makes sparing but deliberate use of the

technique such that it is only employed when absolutely necessary—presumably

mainly to achieve a connotation of otherness. This makes sense given the

album’s overall psychological trajectory: the speaker undergoes a series of

shifts in identity, emotion, and conscious state, and Mangum’s voice is the

guiding communicative force for the speaker’s psyche. From this perspective,

vocal doubling in Aeroplane can be interpreted as an alteration of the

speaker’s psychological state in some way.

In “King of Carrot

Flowers Part 1,” that alteration takes the form of nostalgia. Here, the

speaker’s remembrances of his childhood are doubly corrupted. First, his

memories are selective, romanticizing his fond recollections and relegating

painful experiences to the background. His fond memories are recounted in

lyrical, emotional symbolism, while domestic disputes are chronicled more

directly as intrusions upon his otherwise peaceful period of discovery. The

doubling of the guitar and vocal parts establishes a connotation of warmth that

resembles the rosy tint of this nostalgia.

Secondly, all of

his memories are recalled exclusively through his experiences with an unnamed

loved one. The domination of the second-person tone, and his extreme intimacy

with the lover through whom he channels his memories establishes a strange

duality in the speaker’s identity, reflected by the double-tracking of the

vocals. His identity is often merged with that of this lover; memories of his

lover’s life, particularly those involving the lover’s parents, are recounted

so vividly that they take on an air of first-person memoirs

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Indeed, in “King of Carrot Flowers Part 1″ the identity of the speaker and that

of his lover are fused together by a union that is at once sexual, romantic,

and spiritual:

And this is the room

One afternoon I knew I could love you

And from above you how I sank into your soul

Into that secret place where no one dares to go

The song is a

humble exaltation of innocent youth, and the warm, simple instrumentation and

arrangement supports the tone of fond recollection. Just after the second

verse, as the speaker imagines how “we would lay and learn what each other’s

bodies were for,” an air organ enters to support the guitar line, spelling out

the chords in a fairly straightforward, gentle manner. The density of the song

reaches its peak at the end with the speaker’s final recollection: “And Dad

would dream of all the different ways to die/ Each one a little more than he

would dare to try.” Instead of dwelling on the father’s despair, Mangum

emphasizes his reluctance to die in the final line, singing this phrase an

octave higher than the rest of the melody. This is the first acknowledgment of

the recurring theme of the conflict between the joy that life offers and the

allure of death. The father’s unwillingness to take his own life constitutes

an odd triumph that is nonetheless celebrated as a chorus of multi-tracked

voices joins in, mirroring the repeating V-IV-I cadence in three-part harmony.

An ornamental synthesizer line appears low in the mix to add a childlike

counter-melody to the voices. The song concludes with an air-organ drone on F

that is cross-faded into the drone that starts part two of the suite.

In an album full of

obfuscated meanings, part two of the “King of Carrot Flowers” suite holds the

unique distinction of being the only song that Mangum attempts to explain in

the lyrics insert included with the vinyl LP version of the album. Omitting

the lyrics, Mangum instead issues this run-on clarification of his intentions:

and since this seems to confuse

people i’d like to simply say that i mean what i sing although the theme of

endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more in the

belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that i see as

eternal

Many elements of the song support

this depiction of eternal spiritual power. First, there’s the opening drone

consisting of a single electric organ note rich with harmonics. The sound

could be hinting at the resonance of a church organ, but it is more evocative

of an otherworldly sonic environment. The entrance of the organ is part of a

nearly complete shift from acoustic to electric (or electronically altered)

instrumentation. After several seconds, a banjo figure appears, its bright,

sharp resonance rendered somewhat unnatural with distortion. This figure

slowly repeats four times over the drone for about twenty seconds, establishing

a meditative, trancelike spaciousness. The vocal line enters with a jarringly

direct and impassioned spiritual declaration as Mangum proclaims “I love you,

Jesus Christ,” in a full-throated, unadorned style reminiscent of the American

shape-note singing tradition. The vocal melody starts on F above middle C,

nearly the top of Mangum’s vocal range, and tumbles down to F an octave below

on the word “Christ,” merging with the drone. The note is held for ten long

beats, and Mangum enunciates the name gutturally, separating the ‘i’ vowel

sound into a long ‘ah,’ followed by ‘e’ and then a barely pronounced ‘ist,’

almost like a throat-singer eliciting a spectrum of overtones. The sound also

invites comparisons to the Dharmic sacred syllable, ‘Om,’ held in an extended

meditation. Then he inverts the phrase, insisting, “Jesus Christ, I love you,

yes I do,” suspending a C major chord over the F drone on the word “do”. The

everlasting drone, the cycling guitar figure, the repeating lyrics, and the

singing style all cooperate to portray Mangum’s “endless endless” spiritual

vision.

The lyrics repeat and

the intensity swells as a bass guitar enters forcefully in unison with the

drone. The bass is pushed to the front of the mix and heavily distorted,

dominating the sonic space. This, too, contributes to the song’s spiritual

theme. Distortion gives the effect of equipment being pushed beyond its

capacity, being overwhelmed by the high level of signal input. As the note is

played it is continuously fed back upon itself and can result in almost

unending tones. The combination of these two factors typically results in a

connotation of extreme power (Walser, 1993). In this case, the goal seems to

be the evocation of a sublime spiritual force. At the same time, a highly

dissonant and distorted sound enters low in the mix: a bowed banjo playing

vaguely contrapuntally to the vocal line. This line deliberately deviates from

the Western twelve-tone harmonic system, weakening the previously solid F major

tonality. Producer Rob Schneider remarks, “[I]t has a raw, almost Eastern

quality of being out of tune” (Cooper, 2005, p. 70). The effect is of a

slowly forming rift between Earthly reality and spiritual transcendence. The

intensity continues to build, the speed picks up, and Mangum’s vocal delivery

becomes rapid to the point of incoherence. The speaker is evidently achieving

a transcendental state as his repeated spiritual affirmations finally give way

to what seem to be hallucinatory visions (“the dogs dissolve and drain away”)

and an anticipation of some sort of revelation (“The world it goes and all

awaits/The day we are awaiting”), ending the vocal melody on the same F above

middle C that it began on. As the vocal melody ends, the drone is broken and

an exultant trumpet fanfare enters over a slightly modified chord progression,

inserting a Bb major chord: I-IV-I-V. This sequence splits the difference

between the progression of the second part and that of the suite’s third part.

The speed and volume build ever more until thrashing drums and even louder

distorted bass signify the explosive entrance of part three.

Part three, originally

a self-contained song^[3],

provides a wild release for the speaker’s spiritual meditations. The speaker

spouts a rapid succession of disconnected images in a syncopated melody as the

band plays at a frenzied pace. Though it is prominent in the mix almost

everywhere else on the album, here Mangum’s voice struggles to stay afloat,

awash in a sea of fuzz—nearly every track except for the vocal is heavily

distorted, especially the bass and drums, which fuse together into a churning

propulsive force and dominate the sonic space. The acoustic guitar is all but

lost; only the pitchless percussive attacks on the strings can be discerned at

all in the melee. The song has the approximate sound and energy of punk without

the oppositional connotations. In fact, it is in a sense punk inverted: the

tumultuous sound is of an outside force acting upon the reluctantly compliant

speaker, whereas in punk the force generally originates within a defiant

speaker and is directed outward.

Mangum says the song is

“about my old band the Synthetic Flying Machine

title="">^[4] and

about my mother and about living in Seattle and about trying not to crumble

when I was living there… I was very frightened at that point in my life” (XFM

Radio, 1998). The frantic speed and muddled lyrics certainly convey a good

sense of this disorientation, but the song takes on a broader existential

significance in the context of the album.

The lyrics portray

a life cycle in blinding speed, starting with a peculiar vision of birth:

Up and over

We go through the wave and undertow

I will float until I learn how to swim

Inside my mother in a garbage bin

Until I find myself again

After exiting this crude womb, the

speaker quickly learns to speak and walk:

Up and over

We go mouths open wide and spillin’ stuff

I will spit until I learn how to speak

Up through the doorway as the sideboards creak

The outside force here is some

power—biological, social, or otherwise—that compels the speaker to change,

develop, and behave in certain ways. He has no autonomy, merely going along

with the inexorable flow of the world around him. In the last verse, when he

finally tries to exert some level of agency through verbal communication, he

realizes he is unable to translate his feelings into words that can be

understood by anyone else: “I will shout until they know what I mean/ I mean

the marriage of a dead dog sing/ And a synthetic flying machine.” The suite

ends on a sustained F played on the distorted bass, briefly threatening to return

to the drone of part two until it is abruptly cut off by an anticlimactic low F

played casually on a piano—the sound of the speaker sheepishly snapping out of

his hyperactive hallucinatory state, or just an afterthought affixed as

punctuation.

Taken as a whole, the

“King of Carrot Flowers” suite can be seen as a representation of several

possible perceptions of reality. The nostalgic part one interprets reality

primarily through sensation and emotion. The speaker’s memories are

subjective, corrupted by the tenderness that he inextricably associates with

his childhood. Part two views reality through a purely spiritual perspective;

the speaker receives meaning from the world exclusively through his faith in an

eternal spiritual power. The third part is something of a postmodern portrayal

of the inherent confusion of maturation. The speaker sees himself as an

inconsequential part of a greater whole, rather than as an independent

individual. No intrinsic meaning is attached to his experience as he goes

through life learning to function in society for no particular reason other

than to keep up with a relentless unnamed force. In essence, the purpose of

the “King of Carrot Flowers” suite is to contextualize the speaker and to

provide a setting for the bulk of the album’s themes, many of which are

introduced in the album’s eponymous song that directly follows.

“In the Aeroplane

over the Sea” introduces and explores many of the key themes of the album:

finding beauty in spite of suffering, the destructive and elusive nature of

time, and the ephemerality of life’s pleasures. The song also includes the

first allusion to Anne Frank, whose story will become a compelling conduit for

these themes.

Like “King of Carrot

Flowers Part 1,” “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” opens with unaccompanied,

double-tracked acoustic guitar. The sound, however, is markedly different.

First, the chords are full and serene in contrast to the percussive, bare

triads of the former. While the double-tracking on the first song served to

enhance its percussiveness, on “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” the recording

technique dulls the attacks and results in a spacious, airy performance. The

song is in a carefree 6/8 and in the key of G major, with another simple chord

progression: G major, E minor, C major, D major. After the ubiquitous major

chords in the I-IV-V progressions of the “King of Carrot Flowers” suite, the

addition of the vi chord marks a distinct shift. With four verses, an

interlude, and a bridge, the song takes the form of A A B₁ A B₂

A.

In the first verse, the

speaker celebrates his joy in having discovered a revitalizing new love:

What a beautiful face

I have found in this place

That is circling all round the sun

What a beautiful dream

That could flash on the screen

In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

Soft and sweet

Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

He knows that love and beauty are

fleeting and realizes that his joy is peaking in that very moment, destined to

fade soon. So he chooses to savor it for as long as he can, refusing to allow

his knowledge of its imminent passing to disturb his abounding contentment.

Drums, bass, and

the eerie warble of a multi-tracked bowed saw enter at the start of the second

verse. Here the speaker extends his musings on the transience of joy, likening

it to mortality:

And one day we will die

And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea

But for now we are young

Let us lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see

Anne Frank envisions death in a similarly

innocent fashion in her diary. After her pen accidentally falls into the

stove, she remarks lightheartedly, “I’m left with one consolation, small though

it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be someday!”

(Frank, 1997, p.145). Here, the multi-tracked bowed saw traces out a dissonant

accompaniment mostly consisting of moving thirds (see fig. 2.1). It moves in

swooping, wobbly glissandos in an ever-rising line, lending the song a degree

of wounded beauty akin to the speaker’s misgivings about mortality and the

transience of his joy. The saw line here illustrates the journey of “the

aeroplane over the sea,”—the titular symbol of the album—representing splendor

and grief rolled into one.

height="147" src="http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/Fig21Aeroplanesaw3.jpg" alt="Approximate singing saw melody from 'In the Aeroplane over the Sea.'">

Fig 2.1: Approximate singing saw melody from “In the Aeroplane over the Sea.”

It is

majestic in its flight, but its purpose is grim: depositing cremated remains

into the ocean. The saw fades away for the interlude over the bridge’s chord

progression, which simply rearranges the four chords of the verse to Em-C-G-D

href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title="">^[5].

With E minor as the harmonic center, a trumpet plays a mournful melody,

foreshadowing the melancholy of the upcoming bridge.

By the third

verse, time has passed. The sun has set and evening arrives. Although the

speaker still savors his happiness, the ghost of Anne Frank begins to haunt

him:

What a curious life

We have found here tonight

There is music that sounds from the street

There are lights in the clouds

Anna’s ghost all around

Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me

Soft and sweet

How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

The voice of Anne Frank

represents a past example of beauty that faded all too quickly. Like the

setting sun, it reminds the speaker of the imminence of sorrow in the wake of

his happiness. The saw line persists, taking on new significance as the

manifestation of the voice of Anne’s ghost. As the haunting melody climbs ever

higher and veers on and off key, the notes of the saw truly do “bend and reach

above.” Further, the rising, shrill pitch of the saw resembles the sound of

air raid sirens, omnipresent during Anne’s time in hiding. An entry in her

diary parallels the juxtaposition of this dissonance with the beauty of nature

and love:

The weather was gorgeous, and

even though the air-raid sirens soon began to wail, we stayed where we were.

Peter put his arm around my shoulder, I put mine around his, and we sat quietly

like this until four o’clock, when Margot came to get us for coffee. (Frank,

1997, p.257)

The speaker finally

allows melancholy to overtake him in the bridge. While earlier the song was

resolutely in the present tense, here the tense changes as the speaker turns to

the past, triggered by the voice of Anne’s apparition:

Now how I remember you

How I would push my fingers through

Your mouth to make those muscles move

That made your voice so smooth and sweet

The emotional impact of Anne

Frank’s death upon the speaker surfaces as he imagines himself trying to

physically revive her dead voice, to make her sing— communicate—again, as some

sort of puppet. This could be a reference to Mangum’s own reading of Anne

Frank’s diary. Perhaps he was so shaken to learn of her tragic death that he

descended into a state of denial, refusing to accept that she was truly dead,

just as the speaker deludes himself into believing he could produce the sound

of a human voice simply by moving the right muscles in her body. Perhaps he

views his immersion in her diary as a way of allowing her to continue to

communicate even as the words on the pages are hopelessly static. In any case,

it is clear that the speaker’s attempts to reproduce this lost voice are

futile. As he sings these words, the saw line becomes an amorphous, atonal

quaver, mimicking the sound of a moaning voice. At the end of the bridge, it

collapses into a mess of squeaks and scrapes, the sound of the voice breaking

into a pitchless whimper.

A more specific

reference to Anne occurs in the second half of the bridge:

And now we keep where we don’t know

All secrets sleep in winter clothes

With one you loved so long ago

Now he don’t even know his name

Anne professed love for two

boys—Peter Schiff, an elementary school infatuation, and, to a lesser extent,

Peter van Daan, with whom she spent her time in hiding—but they both tragically

shared Anne’s fate, perishing in concentration camps in 1945 (Frank, 1997).

This example extends even further the theme of inevitable transience: joy fades

to sorrow, life fades to death, and, perhaps worst of all, memory fades to

oblivion.

In the final verse, the

speaker reclaims his joy by returning to his present contentment, and then

shifting his thoughts toward the distant future:

What a beautiful face

I have found in this place

That is circling all round the sun

And when we meet on a cloud

I’ll be laughing out loud

I’ll be laughing with everyone I see.

He still exalts in his momentary

pleasure, but, realizing that it will not last long, he finds solace in

anticipating lasting happiness after life, once his joy on Earth has gone. Nonetheless,

the conflicted beauty of the saw line remains; after allowing the fear of death

and despair to corrupt his thoughts, he is unable to banish it from his mind.

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Come back tomorrow for the next installment of Max Heath’s thesis… Update: The next two installments are available now: Pt. Three and Pts. Four and Five.

If you don’t already own this album, you owe it to yourself to buy it: Amazon, eMusic. Seriously. You need it.