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Little Motel Lyrics

Little Motel Lyrics

Many of the lyrics on the new Modest Mouse album are very hard to hear. Nobody has their hands on the official lyrics yet  - I'm not sure if the album has printed lyrics in the jacket, and the official website doesn't have them. Lyrics sites are crap; most of them will just copy the lyrics (automatically) from one of their competitors. There's not usually an easy way to submit corrections either.

I've mentioned songmeanings.net before. I find it amusing to read people's theories on the meaning of a song when their lyrical transcription is utterly flawed. For example, 'MrSamurai' says, of Little Hotel:

"we fold and we had made a wish
that we wouldn't be missed
If one another just did not exist"

This part seems like its saying that they are going to miss each other, so they wish that they had never existed together.

Uhh what?! I believe the lyrics to that (bridge) go:

The remains of a shooting star
Landed directly on our broke-down little car.
Before then we had made a wish
That we would be missed
If one another just did not exist.

This transcription removes the non sequitur "we fold" - which causes an ugly, ugly unsignalled change from present to past tense (perfect aspect in both?) halfway through the line. The new version also has the advantage of showing a little bit of delayed meaning. There's a gap before that last line, see, so until it arrives the word "missed" reads as referring to the shooting star hitting the car. I'm sure there's a proper name for this technique - the R of the trivium (screw the three Rs) lets me down.

For another little lyrical insight, check out this line from the same song:

I hope that the suite sleeps and suits you well

There's the obvious suite/sweet pun in there, and the super-obvious alliteration, but you only really notice the suite/suit word play when you see it written down (I didn't notice, anyway - think you did/would?).

Edit: See the comments for the corrected lyrics.

Dominic

Comments

Unsignalled is in the OED, but my spell checker shows it as incorrect. So does Google; it suggests 'unsignaled', which isn't in the OED (probably American).

I'm just a little surprised at how rare it apparently is. Stuff those 'word of the day' things: unsignalled is a rare, useful word, and you don't have to (really) remember how to spell it
Dominic
I'm going to hedge my bet and mention that's it's possibly:

"If only we had made a wish"

The jacket lyrics should give an indication (although they're not proofed prepared by the band, and are far from infallible).
Dominic
OK. The official lyrics are in. I was correct about the "before" and "would" parts.

The official lyrics say it's just "before we had", but in the song they _obviously_ put a "then" in there (it has the same weight as "we" and "had"). So, the jacket lyrics are already wrong, or the transcription of them is.

In place of "it rained and it's over" the official lyrics are "the remainder of". Again, that doesn't agree with the song, where it's clearly "remainders". I can't hear the "the" either, so that probably makes it "remainders of a shooting star". A much nicer fit.