I get the intent of this…and it is well researched and makes sense based on the time of its publication…but in my professional opinion (cue my maniacal/“Chris Lowe” laughter)… it gives the impression that PSB is a “choose your own adventure” or traditional board game with a linear path. To me it is more like “Trivial Pursuit,” you will have your favorite albums, put to truly appreciate/“win” the game, you must experience it all…possibly several times over.

That being said, “Relentless” and “Alternative” are two of my favorites so…I think my criticism can only be so harsh….so returns my maniacal/“Chris Lowe” laughter…

…also, no one better come for my dear “Bilingual”…..

…clearly I lost control of my own rant…

Hozier's new songs just dropped . Fun fact about me: I've never been normal about this man. Excuse me while I go absolutely insane.

and just like clockwork twitter and tiktok “swifties” are already doing the 2 things they always do when a new re-recording comes out

1. “she didn’t breathe the same here in (any song) i’m just going to stream the stolen 😡😡”

2. “there’s no way she wrote (any vault track) back in (insert year) she has to have written them post midnights and is lying 🙄”

it literally was never about “improving” or “botching” the album it’s about her owning her work hasn’t she made it clear enough…?

IT’S JUST MOMENTS PASSING MOMENTS PASSING IT’S JUST NOTHING LASTING MOMENT’S PASSING

Man, Disney's Wish just breaks my heart. Like, they began with some fascinating concepts, stuff that subverted many of their established tropes but keeps true to the image of a Disney Princess story. Actual Starboy, evil King and Queen, animation jumping between classical Disney and modern Disney; this film had so much potential to be something that not only encapsulated the company's history but also opened up artistic avenues for the future. But nah, they squandered all that potential just cause they wanted something marketable.

omg soldier, poet, king is NOT a Christian worship song

folks on tiktok being like YALL DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS ABOUT JESUS??? and "better take it off my dnd playlist now!!!"

it's not about jesus holy fuck, i mean, it is, but it isn't.

Dear Wormwood is a concept album that uses biblical symbolism to talk about an abusive relationship. The Oh Hellos have a whole ass THING about retelling stories (biblical, mythological etc) to use to deal with your own story which is like...a whole thing in storytelling anyway (the new testament is a monomyth yall, Hero's Journey 1.0, in that regard everything is biblical)

Dear Wormwood is put in the context of someone writing letters (inspired by The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis) to their abuser. "Soldier, Poet, King" is from the perspective of the protagonist, on the receiving end of the abuse, who (after the song "Exeunt") is escaping from the abuse and attempting to continue their life outside of it. The person who is the soldier, poet, king, is the protagonist. "your city" is the abusive relationship. "Wormwood" is the devil of this person's life.

If you look on Genius, yeah the story is about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In context? It's about the Second Coming of the protagonist. The rebirth they get after escaping.

The ending song of the album, "Thus Always to Tyrants", the last line of the album is

Where I go, will you still follow? Will you leave your shaded hollow? Will you greet the daylight looming? Learn to love without consuming?

The protagonist is attempting to mentally escape from the abuse, worried about carrying the trauma into the next relationship.

Soldier Poet King is not about Jesus. It's about fighting. It's about escaping the cycle of abuse. It's about the power that resides in stories, about people who have experienced this before and succeeded. It's about using those stories and learning from them.

Keep the shit on your dnd playlist, it's sort of the whole point.

i have somewhat of a different interpretation about The Mind Electric

> It's less of a diss track and more of using Heart's tactics against him to get him to listen [while also still definitely being a diss track]

somewhat disorganized rant below the cut [also lots of my own interpretations of the album that may very well be inaccurate, so take everything with a grain of salt] :]

The Mind Electric has a bit of a different topic when it comes to Mind's songs/lyrics, to say the least. while Mind does jab at Heart a lot, he does often try to reason with the other in between insults. The Mind Electric has much less of trying to convince Heart to work with [or behind] him and instead focuses on.. insulting the shit out of them

this is extremely funny, but it seems somewhat abrupt and out of the blue for Mind [see what i did there?]. however, i have a.. semi-theory as to why he suddenly just goes off on Heart. he's playing into the other's tactics

and i don't mean that Heart is constantly baraging Mind with insults. in fact, compared to Mind, Heart very rarely verbally attacks the other head on. instead, Heart builds up this fantasy around themself that paints themself as completely innocent, whereas Mind is this irredeemable villain that wants nothing more than Heart's head on a platter. and while, yes Mind definitely isn't fond of Heart, from what we've seen and heard, he is at least somewhat willing to work with Heart—although his idea of "working" with them seems more for Heart to sit in the backseat and shut up while Mind is the one actually in control, but I digress. this fantasy that Heart builds is most clearly seen from both sides in The Heart Acoustic and Be Born

Throughout Mind's songs [Be Born especially], he is trying to reason with Heart and get them to understand his point of view. he tries to explain that he only wants the best for the person that they make up. but Heart either argues with or outright ignores Mind, holding fast to the facade that they built up—that Mind is the bad guy trying to hurt them, and Heart is the good guy trying to save them. they don't want to hear anything that goes against that. so all that Mind says just ends up hitting a brick wall. this might also be a reason as to why Mind sees Heart as childish [their stubborn nature and them "playing make believe" to a much more serious degree]

at the end of Storm and a Spring, Mind and Heart sing over each other, almost sounding like an argument. this is Mind's breaking point. here, he throws his hands up and pretty much goes, "Fine. You want to see me as the villain? I'll play the villain." cue The Mind Electric. this song serves two roles, in my view. One, the one I've been building up to: Mind is leaning into this role that Heart has forced him into in a last ditch effort to break through and actually get him to listen for once. that's why the song eases up at the end. the last few lines of the song are literally, "Though I seem harsh in all my assessments / We each seek a life lived in the light / Yet there lies our Heart, engulfed in resentment / Stubborn, pale akaryocyte." aka, "Although you see everything I do as cruel and unforgiving, I'm not trying to hurt us. I'm only trying to make things better, and yet YOU refuse to see that, no matter how much I try to tell you this. You're being stubborn and resentful with practically no reason other than to perpetuate your own lies."

The second reason is that Mind is beyond frustrated at this point. he has tried and failed so many times to talk to Heart and get them to see the truth. he's tired. he's fed up. he needs an outlet, so he takes this opportunity to air his grievances [this is what i meant by it still definitely being a diss track, lol]. not only is it a method [albeit a poorly thought out one] to get through to Heart, it's also an excuse to let out his frustrations

that's all from me. i have no clue how to end these so. yeah. please don't execute me :]

20 DAYS DRUG FREE LETS GOOO

ONE MORE DAY TIL 3 WEEKS

Me listening to Heaven, Iowa

This voting period really just feels like im watching a bunch of people force a gay man back in the closet

I know thats not people's intentions but literally how else is he going to take this guilty vote. "I just don't want him to think his lying was okay" he doesn't! And he's not going to think that! He's actively trying to stop lying! All guiltying him will do is tell him he should have kept lying and continuing his relationship!!

"I just want him to have some kind of consequence for what he's done" Was Hinako literally dying not enough??? Sure, he didn't love her, but he still LIKED her. They were friends, they lived together, he married her because he WANTED to love her! He is literally drowning in guilt because of her death, I think he's had enough consequences by now. He might not be wearing his ring anymore, but he still carries it with him, he is very clearly still grieving her death.

"Innocent votes have no effect on him" Yes they will!! It didn't do anything last time because we forgave him for the wrong reasons and because he absolutely hates himself. Assuming we're right about him being gay, which I'm pretty confident we are, having his 'true' self validated rather than his fake one will 100% have a bigger effect on him this time. Guiltying him will only make his self-hate worse and show him that only his false self is forgivable, so he should keep lying to be accepted.

I know most people's intentions are not to make him keep lying, but regardless of whatever intention you have, it doesn't matter how you want him to take it, you can not ignore how he will actually take it.

This is gonna be a bit of a long rambling personal post sooooo do what you will with that information

The way that Butchered Tongue makes me literally sob

Every time I learn more about Irish history and I learn why my name is spelled the way it is and why my family had to come here makes me feel sick

My last name is Egan, it should be Mac Aodhagáin but when the English colonized Ireland they changed the spelling of last names to kill their language and it happened for hundreds of years

This specific line of my family lived in Offaly for centuries until they were starved out of their own country by their queen who had stewardship over them.

But Irish is still spoken, I have ways of learning it, and people are taking back their names and the names of places. They failed at destroying that culture and I am so openly and annoyingly proud of my all my weird amount of Irish ancestry

But if it weren't for the colonization and imperialization of Ireland my name would still be Mac Aodhagáin. My language would be Irish and I'd be living on the same land that almost every other person in my line has lived on.

It makes me want to curl up and cry and it makes me so fucking angry and if this is how I feel about something that was so tame compared to what happened in America then I can only barely begin to imagine how Native Americans feel about how their land and their people and their cultures and their languages have been ravaged. And every other group of people who've had their cultural identity and their population obliterated for the sake of fucking profit

It's horrific what human beings do for the sake of control over other human beings. It makes me sick

I grieve the cultures that were stolen from me, both Irish and Scottish, and I’ve spent several years trying to reconnect with them, but I also know that it’ll never be the same as it could’ve been if they hadn’t been butchered by the English monarchy for hundreds of years. And that hurts very deeply

I encourage everyone to learn about their family history, and in turn it’ll help you learn about who you are.

And I also encourage everyone to listen to Unreal Unearth because it’s very good

I am never forgiving Vessel for closing Sundowning with the song Blood Sport and opening This Place Will Become Your Tomb with Atlantic. Sir how could you do that to your fans? This is just too painful 😭😭

Jashtober Day 27 & 28- Potion & Bass

Designs by @/cinnamonsly!!!

Bonus Bass doodle:

Character/ship playlists that are just 45 Taylor Swift songs in a row are a special kind of evil

Oh man do I love these pictures of Aaron Dessner isn't he so handsome

WAIT guys one more thing. So clearly the whole concept of this album is to talk about the Massive Elephant in the Room (the breakup) by only talking about the one temporary moment of the Immediately After (“we now conduct this post mortem”) which I think is entirely brilliant. But I’m curious what people’s thoughts are on how that can be reconciled with her saying she’s been writing the album for the last two years? To me it entirely reads as “I wrote this in the frenetic haze of last summer,” not “I accumulated this album in pieces over multiple years.” Like…Which song(s) do you we think she even could’ve written back then?