Self-Referential Ethan Miller

i-ec9b82ff0685600b22204b51c68b08ee-ethanmiller2012.jpg

I've been following Californian rock singer and guitarist Ethan Miller off and on since Comets on Fire's 2002 album Field Recordings from the Sun. I love his singing and psychedelic song writing. And so recently the song "Nomads" from the 2008 album Magnificent Fiend (with Miller's current band Howlin' Rain) has been playing in my head. I couldn't quite make sense of the lyrics, so I checked on-line, and found them (perhaps predictably) to be stonerishly meandering. But also bluntly self-referential in a way that is either really stupid or neatly self-ironic. You be the judge, Dear Reader.

Cold and gray clouds staining the sounds
Straining the weight of a sorrowful sky
Wool on the trees, dust on the eves
The bark on the pines is worse than its bite

All of the lines have been lies this far
There is a feeling I must keep from you

...

These lines are crawling snakes up your open legs
You wear them pale and fine
This is the line I'll give you true as the dawn
While the furious eye on the sun is upon us

The way your breasts dance while we're making love
Now that is a line penned by a divinely guided hand

Was the line "Now that is a line penned by a divinely guided hand" penned by a divinely guided hand?

More like this

Standing in lines is the bane of my existence. Okay, well maybe not, but spending time around universities certainly increases the percentage of time I spend pressing the queue. The good thing about lines in university towns is that they often move fairly fast.
I'm teaching a lot of calculus this term, and we just spent the last class period or two talking about straight lines. That makes sense. Calculus is especially concerned with measuring the slopes of functions, and straight lines are just about the simplest functions there are.
Long interspersed repetitive elements (LINEs) make up a HUGE portion of the junk in your genome.

No, he's describing the 'line' of her breasts as having been divinely guided, i.e. not by him. I don't think it's mean to be self-referential.

Still pretentious though, to my eye.

By John Massey (not verified) on 23 Mar 2012 #permalink

Aha, I see! More a wiggly blur of a moving line though, given the activity he mentions.

Depends on the frequency and amplitude of motion, I guess. No experience, me :P

By John Massey (not verified) on 23 Mar 2012 #permalink

Are we talking about "gravity wave" or "gravitational wave" here? It determines what kind of detector you can use.

By Birger Johansson (not verified) on 24 Mar 2012 #permalink