Interesting on the tsunami effect. I’ll listen back to the track with that in mind. Still, maybe if he’d kept out the heavier piano and used the lighter stuff in the background while the guitars rolled in? The dissonance might have been cool.

And I’m glad you’re passionate about it! And articulate. Together, they make great qualities.

But this is the kind of music I love – lots of complex stuff going on under the surface which you only find if you pay very deep attention. I appreciate that’s not everyone’s taste.

Secondly, I think the trouble is that while you can indeed piece together a narrative-as you have through outside material and through interpretive read-the songs themselves, in my opinion, should be able to do that clearly and obviously. Which is why I was complaining about the lack of referent-writing should not be so ambiguous that you need an outside manual to understand it! But people do honestly feel different than I am, and that is a pop-oriented bias I have. And while you may be right about the push-and-pull elements, to me it just felt as if they didn’t connect well as talking about that push and pull. It could have been better written, I thought.

But I’m so glad you took the time to comment and post a very thoughtful comment! And I would love if you want to continue to disagree and talk up the merits in the comments, because civilized discussion is always a plus!

Regards!

Just an aside – the lyrical coherence between the songs is easier to understand once you understand the overall concept of the album. Cook has alluded to this several times in interviews, but most casual listeners would be unaware of these, so it may have been helpful to have some kind of pointer in the liner notes. In brief, the two bookend songs set the stage – In Circadian the narrator is overwhelmed by pain, and takes refuge in his only escape, sleep. The rest of the songs (up to Goodbye To the Girl) takes place in the dream world and loosely traces the arc of a failed relationship from start to finish. In the final song, Rapid Eye Movement, the narrator wakes up again, only to be faced with the overwhelming pain and the need to escape again. That song actually gave rise to the album’s title, from the line ‘Give me one more quiet night / before this loud morning gets it right / and does me in’. (If I had to characterize my take on the album, it’s about catastrophic loss and how we deal with it).

As to the relationship between the songs you mentioned (Time Marches On, The Last Goodbye and Paper Heart), in my opinion it simply reflects that push/pull stage when a relationship is falling apart – that oscillation between ‘who needs this anyway’ and desperately trying to hang on to it.

Be that as it may, thanks again – I found your perspective very interesting!