""Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean"
In the comment, I'll crack this one. If you like to do your own cracking, here's a hint:
Ignore the title. Focus on the character. This track tells a story.
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About Me
- Martin Rinehart
- Tennis players half my age have tried to play a running game to wear the old man out. It never works. A better player can beat me, but not in a fitness war.
1 comment:
Geologically accurate as anyone who hikes in the Catskills knows. As you get to the mountain tops, you're struck by the fact that you're standing on sedimentary rock. Reconointer Rock, a glacial erratic neatly balanced on a point by a receding glacier, shows its ocean origins clearly. (Peekamoose Mountain at 3,000 feet.) Geologists tell us this was ocean bed thrust up four million years ago. But this song is not about Earth's geology.
This is the portrait of a loser. He has a dead end job, but no way to get out of it. (A way to get out of one job is to get another.) He lives in a "room" with a hot plate, TV and fridge (small, one assumes). No, this man doesn't really have a lottery ticket to cash in. Unlike "Outrageous" this track has a definite story line.
Think about home? No, he takes some pride in not thinking about home. "Then comes a letter from home. The handwriting's fragile and strange." This would be a letter from someone - not family or the handwriting would be familiar - taking care of the affairs of a deceased, unspecified relative. "Fragile" suggests the writer is a woman. I'll assume this letter announces the death of the protagonist's mother. (You can assume any relative you like. The track leaves this detail out.)
And this is where, "Nothing is different but everything's changed." He had no ongoing connection with home, ("Never going home."), but now there's a death in the family. Something unstoppable has been put into motion.
Next, he goes to the funeral. It's in a small-town church. Stained glass and choir tell us it's a church; frayed cuffs, mended suggest that it's a modest one. Old hymns and family names "flutter down like leaves of emotion." Nothing is different. He's still a loser with a dead-end job and a room with a hot plate. But emotionally he's changed.
The choir singing "Once Upon a Time..." is a "conceit" in at least two senses. Defining "conceit" home.cfl.rr.com/ighsap/apterms.html says "See John Donne's 'Valediction Forbidding Mourning,' for example: 'Let man's soul be a sphere,...'". Man's soul is not actually a sphere, and the choir didn't actually sing the song in which the choir sings. As to the other sense, Simon's earned the right to pat himself on the back.
It's interesting how this ties geologically to "I Don't Believe" where "The waters receded. The mountains were formed."
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