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melodyofthevoid · 8 months

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The Crane Wives Analyzed: Coyote Stories

(Yes I’m changing the verb every time I think it’s funny)

The mellower of the albums, this focuses on the self. Songs of introspection and reflection. From the firmly anti-capitalism “Hand That Feeds” to the melancholic “Never Love an Anchor”. It isn’t to say there aren’t any moments of intensity. In fact, the vocalists have moments of growls deep and hungry as the eponymous coyotes themselves.

Keep You Safe

It is human instinct to shield oneself from danger, from the fear of the unknown. The pitfalls of anxiety make any risk feel insurmountable and an eternity is spent looking from the outside in. The singer’s feelings took root in childhood, nerves keeping them from climbing trees in fear of a fall, of hurting themself. Believing that they weren’t strong enough, brave enough, weren’t enough to even attempt to try. Watching their friends from a distance as they made it to the heights that inspired such fear.

And then the thesis: Nothing in life comes easy, spoken from a father to a child. Being afraid of the world, of the future, it’s a security blanket. An easy escape that fails to fix any real problems, it won’t truly keep you safe. Waiting and hoping to just suddenly become brave, or strong enough, it won’t happen.

As the singer ages the fears shift, collecting over the years. Not limited to only heights and falling, but grander more existential threats. Fears collected from those around them, accumulated from the news, from loved ones, from friends, trapping the singer in a new web they fear they can’t escape from. They carry them, all of their untold regrets, all of the plans abandoned by the wayside, and remember what their father told them.

Knowing that mistakes will occur no matter what is one thing, acting is another. That first step can appear insurmountable, an eternal obstacle to one’s dreams and ambitions. Because what if? What if this step is a mistake? What if this leads to ruin? What if- What if. How can one say “come what may” when all their life they’ve let that fear paralyze them?

It’s no easy feat, it’s hard, and sometimes, you will fail. But some of the most beautiful parts of life come from those risks, and it’s worth it in the end to climb that tree, pursue that dream, try to be better, braver, because time will pass anyways. You’re no safer in the dark than in the light, so why not?

The Moon Will Sing

Often the Sun and Moon are tied together in symbolism as a pair of mutual lovers or siblings, each with their own beauty. But the truth is that the Moon is simply a ball of rock, reflecting the light of the Sun back to Earth. It doesn’t shine on its own. Forever caught in Earth’s orbit circling around the larger star. Waxing and waning, glowing a faint cold imitation in the night sky.

So too does the singer reflect their partner, a hollowed out shell that only feels worth when they’re with their lover. Being who they’re told to be, in spite of knowing that they at one time possessed the power to be anyone yet they let their partner, their sun, make that choice for them, guide them through the dark. Never once questioning their decisions. The slow guitar a quiet melancholy companion in their lament.

Their heart is empty, bare of any love, endless empty rooms of what could’ve been reminding the singer constantly and yet the weight of a decade’s worth of blind trust and manipulation leave them apathetic. Lying in the dusty bed with their lover wondering what it was truly worth. There’s the implication that they’ve both made their peace with the exhaustion, but it’s impossible to know how their Sun feels. Only the mutual acceptance that this is all that there is.

The chorus entreats to the Moon to sing a song for them, to share in their plight. The only being to understand their pain and tell their story. They know that they love their partner like the sun, bearing the brunt of their darkness and claiming that they had no light of their own. Yet who told them that? Their partner? Others in their life? Regardless of where the belief came from, they shine only –in their eyes– with the light given to them. With the person they’d become.

Perhaps emboldened by the realization that this relationship, who they’d become is not who they want to be, they confront their partner. Lamenting all of who they once were that they’d lost to their lover. Hoarded, implying a theft that’s left them without. All of the words bitten back over the years leaving wounds inside, they want to be themselves again. Have the fire and bite that they’ve so long been denied.

It’s a story without a resolution, a dance with no ending. A moon trapped in the orbit of a sun.

Allies or Enemies

It happens on occasion, a word slips out without meaning to. Maybe it’s been a long day, or week, a hard time in general. Maybe patience that typically let issues slide before ran out, and you let out a statement in closed quarters that felt good to say, yet it wasn’t genuine. Authentic. Yet someone overheard, and now it’s a problem. It started a fight, and you’re left with the question of what happens next?

The singer’s words are destructive, in their own admission, wildfires and weeds that spread far beyond where they started them. Plaguelike in their transmission. Perhaps it was frustration that tinged their vision red and let loose pointed insults, weaknesses they knew the other had but promised to never target. A threat they didn’t mean. They swear that they didn’t mean it, voice dropping lower before swelling again as they ask their partner to listen to them. That moment of weakness wasn’t meant to be heard, using the turn of phrase “you owe me ears for dropping eaves” to call their partner out for listening in. Asking for the moment to be forgotten before asking the titular question: are we allies or enemies?

The third verse reminisces on better times when an off comment or heated moment could be dispelled with a joke. Anger fizzling into nothing. Now it’s different, now the anger lingers and the air grows cold. They’re fighting now and it hurts, neither happy about the situation and the singer pleading for the “war” to stop.

Because the options are now to either give their relationship another try or to bow out, walk away from one another. And in spite of the troubles they’ve had, the singer wants to try again. They want to put the war to bed and love again, to be let in and try to remedy what’s been done. Still the uncertainty remains, are they in fact allies or enemies?

Unraveling

Love and loss run as constant themes throughout The Crane Wives’ discography, the latter serving as the origin of so much hurt. Formerly happy memories sour, the relationship that once brought out the best in you now falls apart. That support system shattering, especially if the relationship meant more to one party than the other.

In the midst of the journey, one can forget that there was ever a problem, as the singer recalls. Their first love a tailor, who took to them as though they were a project. Eagerly attending to their needs, “stitches neat and clean”. And now that love is gone, the work unfinished, and the singer is unraveling.

Each love following carries a different title, a gardener, a carpenter, each using their skill sets to fix in the only ways they know how. The gardener plucks away weeds and trims the excess, the carpenter carves a smile and sands down the edges, and each one leaves in the end. Each change that they made a source of suffering now that they’re gone. With the “weeds” plucked away and without a hand to tend, the singer is withering. The carpenter sanded the edges but those held them together and now cracks are widening.

The singer laments that they didn’t understand how much they needed those they were with, and while this may be a “taken for granted” statement, in the broader context of the song it’s a realization of how intertwined they became in their relationships.

Their last love married them, “tied me up in knots” or in plain terms, tied the knot. The line before that “kissed me once before he left” implies perhaps a draft or war, a brief love where the pair married before they were likely ready. He left, promising to come back home and then never returning.

A personal interpretation is that all of the lovers: the tailor, the gardener, the carpenter, the man, are all the same person. The singer lamenting the different aspects of him now that he’s gone. The “you” in “I never knew I needed you” could very well be singular or plural, but I feel that’s up for interpretation.

Hard Sell

Fun part of growing up, as I and others have discovered, is the fact that no one has it all together. Everyone’s just making things up as they go along to the best of their ability. Which kind of sucks honestly when you first hit that revelation. Because all your life you’ve operated under the assumption that adults know what’s going on. That people in charge have a plan. But no, actually.

And that makes life tricky at best. Much to the singer’s chagrin. Each day they get up and do their best to make something out of their lives, pushing aggressively on good days to buy into the “hard sell” of the way life is supposed to go. A hard sell, in marketing terminology, is an overly forceful sales tactic. High pressure and meant to close a deal. When things are going well, the singer can swallow the bitter pill. Most of the time there’s nothing they can get a grip on, it either tears into them or falls apart at the slightest touch. Moth wings and barbed wire.

It’s tearing them apart too, their voice stopping and starting in sentences as though on the verge of the breakdown that they’re warning they’re on the brink of. They want a respite, someone to come in, wipe their tears away and say it’s alright. Comfort is in short supply in a world obsessed with profits and success. Where not having it all together is a badge of shame.

They ask if it’s really just them who can’t get their life in perfect order? Is everyone pretending to have it all wrapped up in a nice little bow? They’re holding on with a loose thread of their own but they keep pulling at it. Trying to get closer to perfection or tear it all apart.

The compulsion to pick and tear at any flaw or imperfection comes with the desire to eliminate them. Because if you can pull away the holes, maybe there’s something worthwhile underneath. “A better me”. There isn’t, not one that can be revealed like this.

They plead for everyone to stop pretending for a moment, so maybe they could all be honest with themselves. Maybe then they could all actually figure things out. Be a little kinder. Or maybe not, and it’s all a mess regardless.

Rock Slide

A quick, breezy song, running fast and sudden as the titular event. A distinctly Folk™ aesthetic, the kind of song passed down and sang with a small town dance. It swings and swirls and then lets you go.

The singer feels the oncoming disaster coming from the mountain top, warning their lover that they’d better skip town and run before the rock slide buries them alive. They’d only just arrived, just planted roots but the singer insists they have to go lest “the devil come to claim them”.

It seems the pair have tumbled their way from town to town, and there’s something on the horizon that gives the singer reason to fear that their time is up and they have to go. Sprinting away without looking back.

Why are they running? What are they running from? The law? Are they con-artists? Is their relationship forbidden, and they have to go before they’re found out and killed? The line “that monster’s coming and it don’t care for you or me” seems to point towards the latter, with a pursuing force that will never stop. Sees them as less than human.

A brief song, one of a few on this album, but a fun one.

Metaphor

Ah the metaphor, that favorite of literary devices. A comparison that can dress up any subject, turning the mundane into the extraordinary. Blood red sunsets, the infinite diamond tapestry of the night sky, they accentuate, and in some cases, obfuscate. Like the lyrics in many of the songs in the Crane Wives’ repertoire, the singer relies on metaphor to obscure the meaning of their words. Dressing their language in borrowed phrases and secondhand expressions picked up from others to keep themselves apart, separate. Their intentions untrustworthy at face value.

Because sometimes it’s easier to keep cards close to the chest and become a character rather than let someone in. If one wraps themselves in enigma, then they don’t have to worry how others see them, they control their perception. It’s safe, it’s clean.

They keep no secrets, no skeletons in their closet, because instead they dig graves. They cut contact, they leave. Or perhaps they’re the one who’s been left before. Once bitten and twice shy, no longer willing to expose the truth of themselves for fear that it will be turned against them. They beg for you not to look too deeply into the words they say, to look at them for too long, lest you see the scars.

And again they acknowledge that they’ve honed their skills, stretching the truth into sweet meaningless fluff. Cotton candy, without substance and liable to fade away at the slightest touch. Untrustworthy, as they’ve made themselves to be.

The Hand That Feeds

The anti-capitalist anthem we need in these trying times. All the more relevant with the rising surge of unions in the United States in the wake of years of abuse from those in power. A personal recommendation, if you can listen to a live recording of this song, please do. It will make you want to yell and scream the song in tandem as a fair warning, but it’s so worth it.

It’s a tale as old as time, the dream of working hard, earning a living, and making it for yourself in America. Yet, that dream serves as nothing more than fantasy, an empty promise obscuring the harsh reality. There’s no escape from the rat-race, no reward for a job well done. Any and all hope dashed against the grindstone. Those who come home from their jobs howl their laments to the sky, forced to work themselves to the bone in order to even scrape out a living. Chained to their jobs, nothing more than mere animals to the greater system.

The chorus echoes sentiments of early work folk songs, coins clinking together in otherwise empty pockets. No real money but the bare minimum that makes noise in its lacking. It gives the song an aged quality, as though it came from the Great Depression where coins were often all a family had to feed themselves. Now pocket change can’t even buy a meal anywhere. They can’t stop the time either as it passes, generations stuck in the same cycles of poverty wages under the same circumstances and masters.

The singer’s family endured this injustice, their father having traded his youth, his heath, his dreams for the Great American Ruse. Selling pieces of himself for cheap to put food on the table. But he warns his child to take their own path. He wanted to give them a better life than the one he’s made. Don’t follow his example or they’d have squandered those years of work.

He taught them how to stand up for themselves, to not merely take what they’ve been handed and be grateful for the scraps. They deserve better, they are better. And the hand that feeds earns no loyalty, especially when it turns cruel and strikes those it deems lesser than. If you are a dog to them, remind them that a dog has teeth.

And so the child raises their voice, proclaiming that their freedom is worth more than a paycheck. That the empty promise of becoming rich means servitude to the rich. They’ll never have them.

Remember: you’re not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. You have more in common with the man you see on the side of the road than you do any ceo. Any set of unfortunate circumstances could land you destitute. There’s power in numbers if the recent wave of strikes has shown anything. They rely on the man to make their numbers go up.

Remind the hand that feeds that it still has fingers because we let it.

Little Soldiers

Love, war, two subjects that go hand in hand. The ever dragging drudgery of attempting to salvage a relationship when it’s devolved into nothing but fighting. It’s a familiar subject for the Crane Wives, and herein is the aftermath. The words they’d used to hurt one another the soldiers in the war, each side dug in and yet holding hands across enemy lines. (Perhaps the war in “Allies or Enemies” finally coming to a close). Pretending that everything was fine.

The singer swears that they loved their partner once. The line repeated at a near yell, as if daring them to challenge this fact. It’s frantic, desperate. And yet all too exhausted at the end of the war.

Each side resorted to dirty tricks and low moments in their fighting. Their partner would offer their secrets to others and let the “dogs” hurt them, hounds of the war. And the singer would bring their grievances to every room in their home, never giving a moments peace and yet their lover would hold them at night anyways.

Now they’re left without their lover and they swear they were loved once. That it meant something once.

At the bridge they concede that the whole thing is a loss, but not out of surrender. They’d each tried to make it work, afraid to give up for varying reasons. They’d done their best. It wasn’t enough.

And it’s over, the silence ringing with the remnants of war songs. Boxes packed as their lover moves away and leaves at the end of it all. The singer fought tooth and nail until the end and yet… it was futile. Their lover already left. Perhaps the war was more one sided than they initially thought.

The imagery of war, the trenches, coming home in boxes, it brings to mind thoughts of futility. Wars that never end with no “winner”. No resolution. They affirm, quiet now, that they swear that they loved their partner once. Then louder as they face the aftermath of the war. Left to pick up the pieces.

Sleeping Giants

A song of awakening, starting off with the same rocking guitar from “Rock Slide”, both involving mountains. There’s a force rolling down the mountains, power rising in the land and rushing into their veins. Every aspect of nature from the moon to the trees are changing, there’s an uprising. An energy. Something is calling now, and it wants the singer to follow.

Another one with not a lot going on lyrically, but it’s a rocking good time to listen to.

Of Everlong

A short and sweet melody, a melancholy lament of only vocals. A soft lullaby reminiscent of older bluegrass. A song of distance and a journey. Mourning for a lover to let them go after they’ve died, because in the end they belong to them.

It’s a departure from their other songs, barely coming in at over a minute long, but it highlights how magical their harmonies are.

Not much to say here, but a pleasure to listen to.

Never Love an Anchor

Oh where to begin with this song. How does one describe a wound? A hole where a heart goes? Knowing that they hurt when they were meant to heal. A role they were never meant to fill and failed to live up to.

“On some level I think I always understood that these hands of mine were clumsy, not clever”. Off the bat the song hits with the self awareness that there is so much they could do but knowing that the attempt would break things, that they are clumsy. No skill to be found. And yet their heart it is “guilty not remorseful”. They keep this fact locked away but they know. They know that they’re failing, but don’t feel remorse. They fear their true feelings would be overbearing and thus keep them away, opting for neglect instead.

The singer is an anchor, keeping their loved one weighed down in their mind. So they cut them loose. Set them sailing away. Letting the distance grow until they couldn’t hurt the other anymore. A necessary separation that leaves the singer forever wondering. Stuck in what-if scenarios, unsure of whether to breach the gap between them or to leave it be. How are they doing now? Better? Worse? Do they resent the lack of effort or understand? Do they deserve that understanding at all?

The paradox of being “someone I have loved but never known”. How do you unpack that? It evokes so many images of moments where love could be shown but was said. Small actions never done to prove that love. The barest bones of a relationship there, yet never explored, never encouraged. Even the singer acknowledges this, wondering if they’re ever thought of, wondering if there’s questions as to why they did what they did. Never tending to a fever, never holding gently.

Others have spoken on the selfish nature of the singer, calling them cruel and callous. And they acknowledge this. And yet they wonder what the other thinks of them. Wonders if their failings outweigh the harm they might have caused if they had tried.

Then there is the final line. “And wonder why they never had the chance to lose you.” What else is there to say? That the singer gave up before ever fully trying. That they resigned themselves to not getting attached so they wouldn’t have to bear the heartache themselves. They are selfish, and they leave whoever the song is addressed to with that knowledge.

It is the failings of a parent, someone meant to love, the failing of a partner who doesn’t know and doesn’t want to risk themselves. It leaves the listener hollow, with the knowledge they did nothing wrong, but that they had no way of fixing something they likely threw themselves at in vain.

The instruments in the back only heighten the emptiness, with a soft melancholic guitar and light drums as the only accompaniment. There is no anger in this sadness, no entreating. Only the sound in the space.

New Discovery

A wistful wandering, that feeling that comes when the sun peeks through the clouds and breaks the fog. Expanding horizons broader than ever thought possible. If “Safe Ship, Harbored” lamented a shrinking horizon, then this declares a new journey. A yearning for more than what they have because they deserve more than simply staring at the water forever. They want to find something new, untouched, see beauty the world’s never known. What good is the world if everything’s already been seen? What’s the point of staying only within the known?

It’s easy to get lost in the repetition of life though, when the days roll by like an endless desert. Rolling dunes identical to the naked eye. Yet, one can continue through, seeing the path behind them, a reminder that they’ve come a long way and there’s further to go. Pick a direction, and go. Keep going, and don’t waste the work you’ve done up to that point.

The singer cries their hopes to the heavens, that they want something to be left for them, something new to discover, something more to life. Something waiting for them if they only try.

And of love, the singer wants a love that’s ever changing. That as the years go on, as age alters their bodies and weathers their souls, they want to find something new to love. To never fully know their lover and find a new way to love them all over again. There can always be more, if they’re willing to discover it.

#the crane wives #my writing #melody rambles #lord this took a while sorry folks #it's been a Time #hopefully I finish Foxlore and the singles before the next album comes out lmao #at least there were a few short ones in here that didn't take much #to no one's shock the first of these I completed was never love an anchor

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