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mickilennial
The Most Trusted Name in News
Gender: Female
Age: 35
Location: Detroit 
- #11
- Posted: 06/09/2014 00:24
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| BrandonMiaow wrote: | -_- Seriously with that last sentence? Ugh.
Anyways, I'm not gonna argue since it's just your opinion of the song but for fuck's sake what's with all the elitism and the condescension? It's pretty beautiful. It reminds me of that greek myth with the poor old couple who feed a disguised Zeus and either Hermes or Apollo and when the gods uncover themselves and thank the old couple and will grant them two wishes, one of their wishes is to die at exactly the same time so they don't have to go a minute without each other. Been a while since I read it (sixth grade?) so it is a bit paraphrased but still.
Edit: I realize I'm being kinda rude but your whole paragraph rubbed me the wrong way. XD Sorry though. |
I don’t mean it as an elitist statement (hur hur I’m so above this hur hur), but rather I feel strongly that it is a bad song and something that turns a nearly perfect record into something really bad. I don’t mean to generalize, but it feels like a song that inexperienced writers outside of Gibbard’s depth would write—it seems like it’s something Gerard Way would have wrote on his first album. As a writer myself it seems a pathetic cash-in on the trends of the time, remember I was in high school at this time and I was into stuff like this. As was said before, it’s a song written quickly and a lot of fans have spoken about it. I really can’t stand it and it makes me cringe, of course I’m going to speak strongly in a negative context about it.
| Quote: | I think there are some songs that are honest and straightforward to a fault. "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" definitely skews as a song that wears its heart on its sleeve. The song is by no means subtle. Heck, it uses the "Earth Angel"/I-VI-IV-V structure. It seems that anyone who writes a song that is about romance--not even about love, but about the sensationalism of almost unstoppable euphoria--resorts to that chord pattern. I wouldn't call it lazy, but I would say that it falls under a category of songs that rely on a very specific tactic to work. Also, the Catholic school verse is something that, even though it's not nonsensical, adds a sort of asymmetry to the track. If Gibbard had spent more time with the song, that verse could have become something else. Heck, maybe the third or first verse would have become something else.
But like I said, I love "I Will Follow You Into the Dark." It's a song that has certainly become less meaningful, but whose refrain gets me every time. "If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks/Then I'll follow you into the dark." There's something about that phrase, that combination of words, that is so aesthetically appealing and fulfilling to me. It doesn't have to say "I love you, and nothing else matters but you." It says, to me, "If you will have me, then I will be there, and you won't have to be alone." Stephen King wrote something about the word "lonely"--that it was the dirtiest word in the English language, and that it was synonymous with hell. Personally, I like this philosophy, and I'm subsequently enamored by Gibbard's answer to it. I don't feel intellectually cheap if this appreciation is shared by a demographic with whom I share no real common ground. All I think is that Gibbard wrote a very direct, yet understated song that made sense to lots of people. There's no shame in that. Heck, I'll take it over any of the melodrama on an album like 21. Gibbard, to his credit, made a song that has a beginning, a middle, and (obviously) an end. He justifies his thoughts by constructing a world filled with context, with is life, as a way of mitigating the inevitable. Gibbard creates a thesis, and follows it with supporting claims and arguments. Most lyricists aren't so thoughtful, and with so much detail, Gibbard's declaration of companionship feels earned.
I don't mean to argue. I'm sure the other side of the coin is more vivid than I'm giving it credit for being, but like I said, I think the song works. Just saying why I think it does. |
Ben Gibbard has always written with his heart on his sleeve and has told stories that have been much more well-written (The New Year, We Looked Like Giants, Nothing Better, etc) in the context of narrative and not something that reads out of a teenaged girls notebook—I wrote bad high school poetry of the same regard and it’s out of the same embarrassing tropes. But again this is just my strong feelings on it; perhaps a much more pessimistic view on this sort of writing if not a cynical one. I find the lyrical songwriting absolutely intolerable and lazy even if you put forward an intellectual counterpoint like you have which I totally respect but I can’t subscribe to it. This whole thing reads like an insincere contrived piece of teenaged pop in the most ill way. This is the opposite of a Jimmy Eat World song and it just doesn’t work.
I know the way I came across initially was "it's shit, objectively shit" but that is not so as I cannot find an objective reason to hate the song mechanically as all of my aggravation is on the lyrics that I as a writer and even more as a reader/listener find terrible and shallowly commercial.
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- #12
- Posted: 06/09/2014 13:56
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With their yearning, heart-on-their-sleeves music, Death Cab always had the potential to be The CW house band, and on Plans, they finally make good on that promise leaving their old fans in the dust.
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- #13
- Posted: 06/09/2014 17:32
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As amazing as this album is, I love "I will follow you into the dark."
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Skinny
birdman_handrub.gif
- #14
- Posted: 06/09/2014 17:35
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Not for me. And I trusted you, Seth Cohen.
_________________
2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.
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