Dan Wilson sings in verse 1, “open all the doors and let you out into the world”. I am more familiar with this concept in the gig setting, where the lights go on after the headline band has left the stage for good. When a bar closes, people stop drinking because they can’t buy any more booze, and the lights go on. But…let’s look for a bit more meaning, shall we? It’s important to note that there’s no pretentiousness whatsoever in word choice here, which suits the theory that it’s really a song about a bartender saying “last call!” and taking the last alcohol orders before the lights get turned on and everyone gets kicked out of the joint. Even the bridge is stolen from the second verse. If you look straight at the words without thinking about what they mean, ‘Closing Time’ is a pretty repetitive and simple song, isn’t it? I mean, look. So gather up your jackets, move it to the exitsĮvery new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end This room won’t be open ’til your brothers or your sisters come Time for you to go out to the places you will be from You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here One last call for alcohol so finish your whiskey or beer Turn all of the lights on over every boy and every girl Open all the doors and let you out into the world Yes, it means ‘time for last orders’, but closing time can also indicate closing of a chapter in your life, and while the two words taken by themselves are ambiguous whether or not that closing is positive or negative, I think without a doubt in Dan Wilson’s world, it’s overwhelming positive. Like many of the song analyses I’ve done for this site, I don’t think ‘Closing Time’ is as simple as most people think. And yet they have, because their marriage is one built with so much strength. Even when 2 years ago, when they had to say their final goodbyes to their young daughter who had been born with a birth defect, they were each other’s rock as I sat there at the funeral, feeling dumbstruck by grief, wondering how they would continue. Turned out he was better suited for our friend anyway, and they ended up getting married, which I am so thankful for because they are one of the few couples I know who support each other through everything. We had the music thing in common, surely he’d be interested in me. (See? Even back then I was hopelessly drawn to musician types.) I turned up for a friend’s birthday party where I was supposed to meet this guy, but he only had eyes for another one of our friends. So much that one of them tried to set me up with a guy they knew who boasted he could play the song on guitar and he knew all the words too. It became so large in my ‘mythology’ (I’m being sarcastic that’s why mythology has single quotes around it) that my girlfriends all knew how much I loved that song. I pick up song lyrics quickly, and in a world where we generally only listened to regular radio on boomboxes and the internet had barely become a thing, ‘Semisonic’ quickly became one of those tunes that I had on repeat not only on my pathetic sound system at school, but also in my head. The song spoke to me instrumentally first, with the lyrics feeling right for the music, but its meaning didn’t really come to me until I started thinking about what songs I might want to analyse on Music in Notes in 2014. To say that ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic was a song that defined my and my friends’ lives in school would be an understatement. And knew when to break out the air guitar during the solo. There is a small group of songs, definitely numbering less than 10, that I would say I recall sitting in the back of one of our friends’ cars, with the radio turned way up, and everyone knew all the words too. Where to find it: ‘Feeling Strangely Fine’ (1998, MCA)
Also, seeing that the writer has already explained the meaning of his song, this post is now closed to comments.
Personally, I think it’s strange anyone would use anything related to a bar and drinking as a metaphor for the birth of a baby, but that’s artistic license. A woman with a science background (doubly weird, considering my main vocation) wrote a post a couple days ago, reminiscing about the birth of one of her children, tying this event in with Dan Wilson explaining in 2008 what the song is about.
#SEMISONIC CLOSING TIME MUSICPLEER UPDATE#
Update 18/01/15: this past weekend, this post was inexplicably barraged by comments, which I thought was a bit strange, given that I posted it on Music in Notes a year ago.
0 kommentar(er)
