My Favorite Plum

This waltz is about the deliciousness of wanting and waiting and not-yet-having. It is the last song on Vega's Nine Objects of Desire, on which they are, um, 12 songs. So it is unclear how, among the other songs, these nine objects are distributed; some songs must have none, while others have one-- and maybe more-- apiece.

What is clear is that this song is about one object, a plum, and the desire for that object. Another object of desire is the "tombstone" from the previous song, most likely. She never outright says she wants a tombstone, though, just that she "likes" tombstones.

This plum, however, she clearly desires. The entire song is about wanting it-- or whatever it represents. I mean, could a whole song just be about wanting this one plum?

One of the reasons the plum might be so desirable is outlined right off: it "hangs so far from me." Distance, like absence, can make the heart grow fonder. Also, it "sleeps," and "lays/ languid." The inner flesh presses the outer skin, indicating that it is "bursting with secrets." And all while "never noticing me here below." How temptingly coy!

Its appearance? "See how it shines." Its flavor? "It will be so sweet." It is luscious? "I've been so dry/ It would make my heart complete."

How does it... sound? It "calls" to her. It wants her to consume it, she just knows. And all this lying about? "It lies in wait for me."

She knows she wants this one and none else: "This is the one for me." This refrain will be repeated. She has "seen," even "had," the "rest"... and also the "best"-- this one-- which "is the one for me."

However, the course of true love never did run smooth. There exists the possibility that she may not achieve this plum: "Maybe a girl will take it/ Maybe a boy will steal it/ Maybe a shake of the bough/ Will wake it and make it fall." And so, "You say that I'm foolish to trust."

Yet, her faith is unshaken: "It will be mine, and I know it must." How can she be so certain? She is "right here/ Longing endlessly." When it falls, she will be there to catch it.

In many ways, the singer is in the same position as the figures on Keats' Grecian urn: "Fair youth... thou canst not leave thy song... Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss/ Though winning near the goal."

Does this sound frustrating? Keats says no: "Do not grieve... For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!.. For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd/ For ever panting, and for ever young."

So too, in this song, we find a moment frozen in time-- the wanting of the ripe, succulent plum, the imagining its smooth rind giving way to the teeth, the longing for the shock of sweet wetness as the pulp caresses the tongue, the dreaming of the sticky juice running rivulets down the chin...

You know, this song may not be about a plum, after all.

Next Song: Lightning

Tombstone

There is a lot of ambiguity in this song. Then again, the subject is death, and most people are ambiguous on that topic.

It begins by the speaker saying she like tombstones because they endure. Then she says "If it stands or if it crumbles/ Only time will tell." So... does it endure or might it erode? Unless she means, by saying that a tombstone "weathers well" that it gains character as it ages.

She continues that she wants her name carved "deep" into the stone, to make sure that if and when the stone does erode, the name will remain. So she expects visitors. Yet, she does not wish to greet them: "You must let me sleep."

She does say that the guests must comport themselves: "There'll be no dancing on my gravestone." Usually, this expression means "to celebrate a death," usually of one's enemies. But she says this as if she means there might be genuinely happy dance parties at her grave-site, and doesn't want those, either.

Then comes a line which does not seem to directly relate to death: "I don't need to see the gates of famous men." But when would someone want to do that? We want to see the men, not their gates (aside from on the actual website "Driveways of the Rich and Famous"). We really only tour their mansions once they are... oh. Hmm.

"But I do try to see the kingdom every now and then." This line sounds like something a royal personage would say, if forced to leave the palace. Unless it means "The Kingdom" as in "of Heaven." But how does one "visit" Heaven? At church? At a graveyard?

Oh, she's about to tell us: "If you ask me where it is..." Yes? "It's on a humble map." Well, an earthly king would brook no such map of his kingdom, so this must mean she is referring to Heaven. Further, "to enter in the doorway, show your handicap." Yes, before one enters the Pearly Gates, one must be prepared to confess one's shortcomings and sins.

This song sounds like it comes from a person reconciled with her mortality, but not ready to actualize it. "Time is burning... it burns away," she muses. She doesn't say she wants to fan the flames and hasten its burning, just that she is aware that it is, in fact, doing so.

She'd like to be remembered, but if that's not to be-- oh, well. She doesn't care if she meets anyone famous in Heaven as much as she simply would like to go there and see it for herself. And she is prepared to wait her turn, then come clean as she steps up.

An almost logical approach to what, for most, in a highly emotional subject.

Next Song: My Favorite Plum

Honeymoon Suite

Get your mind out of the gutter right now. This song is not about what (ahem) happens in the privacy of a newlywed couple's hotel room.

This is about a nightmare the groom has, during the honeymoon.

First, we see the room itself. It is in "France," and the ceiling is painted with "angels in a dance." This is a nice detail, but it also presages another sort of procession, one in a dream. A dream often uses whatever imagery the waking mind had handy as fodder.

Her new husband has a "was not feeling well," a sure-fire killer of a romantic mood, so when they "went to bed," it was, disappointingly, in the literal sense. Sleep does not provide a cure, sadly. He wakes up with a headache.

He describes to her his nighttime experience: "A hundred people" of varying ages "had come through our room that night" and each "asked if he was all right." They each "lined up to touch his hand." But he told each in turn, "They had come for the wrong man."

But did they? He was sick, and they were asking if he was OK, something you only ask sick people. So while he dismissed their help out of pride or shame, they kept coming.

Perhaps superstitiously, the couple decides the dream was not the result of a malady or a reaction to a heavily-sauced French dinner, or even a night of Parisian club-hopping. It is also not thought to be a subconscious reaction to another circumstance in the man's life, such as getting married or simply sleeping under a picture of people in an endless line.

No, they ask the concierge if there had been an incident in the room, "a death, or something strange." She smiles, but says nothing.

Again odd is the new wife's reaction. She does not try to interpret the dream. She does not worry about her husband's mental state, either in the sense of "Gee, I hope he's OK," or "Did I just marry a crazy person?"

Instead, she makes this about her. "What I'd like to know is... with all the people in that room/ Why none appeared to me?"

This may seem like a joke. Of course you can't see figures in someone else's dream. Not outside of a sci-fi movie, anyway.

But she presses her point. "When we sleep so close together that our hair becomes entwined/ I must have missed that moment in the gateway to his mind."

If she is really that concerned about not feeling emotionally connected to her new husband, perhaps she should be asking a different question. She never could have seen what was inside his dreaming mind.

But she should wonder why, with all the people the man imagined asking after his welfare, why were none of them her? To be fair, he didn't seem to imagine any of his family, friends, or co-workers asking him if he was "all right," either.

Still, if any one person should be there, shouldn't it be her? Why didn't he see her asking if he were OK? And not in some queue, either, but at his sickbed's side?

Here is a man so physically miserable, he can't even enjoy his honeymoon. And instead of worrying if he is in need of medical attention, or if he's psychosomatically reacting to whatever it is his dream is about, she is worrying that he's keeping secrets from her... secrets he doesn't even know he has!

What if you were this woman's friend, and received this phone call: "Oh, Paris is fine, and we have a lovely room. But last night, that new husband of mine had a dream, and I didn't have the same dream! I have no idea what the dream means, and who cares. Hmm? Oh, the dream was about people asking if he's OK. Is he OK? No, he was so sick he had to go to bed early and woke up this morning with a headache. But the real problem is that I can't read his subconscious mind."

If she missed a "gateway" to his mind, it may be that it's because she was so focused on her own. And he may have been dreaming that a thousand strangers were asking if he was OK because his deepest wish is that someone-- like the love of his life over here-- would actually ask.

There seems to be a vicious circle, here. He worries that she doesn't care, so he shuts her out... and she worries that he doesn't share, so she retreats inward. He, at least, is trying to reach out by telling her his dream. Now she has to reach back and try to help him understand his dream's meaning.

She's upset that she doesn't know his dream? But she does! He just told it to her!

It's time for her to stop bothering the benighted hotel staff with her problems, imagining ghosts of murder victims, and talk to her husband about himself. About his view of their relationship.

Then, the next time he dreams about strangers asking him how he is, he can tell those dream-figures, "Don't worry about me. I'm fine-- my wife's taking good care of me."

Lolita

Sting, in "Don't Stand So Close to Me," refers to "that famous book by Nabakov." The book he means is Lolita. It is the tale of a man who lusts after a young woman, as in too young.

Most of the works based on this character, like Sting's song and Stanley Kubrick's movie, were created by men, as was the original. Vega's response, as a woman, is to address the character directly; the speaker takes it upon herself to offer a somewhat motherly "a word of protection."

"Lolita, almost grown... go on home," urges the speaker. Have some dignity, she advises, and "Don't be a dog all your life... beg[ging] for some little crumb of affection... a token of blood or tenderness."

The "blood" may refer to the blood that often (but not always!) occurs when the hymen is disturbed during initial intercourse.

This Lolita is trying to "be somebody's wife," and that is not what she needs to be pursuing at this point in her life.

But how can the speaker presume to talk to her, what does she know? Well, a lot, as it happens, and from personal experience: "I've been when you are standing... in your mother's black dress," trying to appear older than she is.

She is "leaning in the doorway" provocatively. But being in a doorway is also being, metaphorically, in a place of transition from one status to the next; she is "almost" grown, but not quite-- so, on the threshold, in the doorway as it were, of adulthood.

Why is this Lolita acting this way? The speaker knows: "So hungry/ For the one understanding." Well, says the speaker, don't go to men for that. Here, I'll be your friend, I'll understand better than any man could.

So don't trade your youth and innocence-- and body-- for the understanding that is not forthcoming from some... guy, dear. Go on home.


Next Song: Honeymoon Suite

World Before Columbus

This simply-worded and -structured song is one of Vega's loveliest. The sentiment is pure and deep, without being... sentimental.

It imagines the speaker's world without the one she loves. If he left, or died-- or for some other reason his love and life were "taken from" her-- the "color" would leave her life. She would lose "half [her] sight," she counts so much on being able to know his perspective. After the colors faded, the "light" itself would go, not just "dim," but "dark."

Her world would be "cold"-- the very "trees would freeze"-- and "cruel."

Now, popular misconception holds that, before Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat, but he proved it to be round. In fact, the world's shape-- and even its size-- were known to the ancients, even without sailing anywhere (they observed lunar eclipses, in which Earth always cast a round shadow; only spheres do that).

Still, we know the myth of the "flat Earth" theory, and here, the speaker so depends on her lover that without him, her world would be "flat." Someone could "sail to the edge, and [she]'d be there, looking down."

"Looking down" has many meanings. She would be "sad," but also "looking down" over the edge, as if saying she was contemplating jumping off it. Later in the song, she confirms this: "I'd swim over the brim."

After lauding explorers like Columbus, she then reconsiders and decides that they sought relatively worthless treasure: "land... riches... trinkets." But "oh, they never will have you." Even his "hair" is made of "gold" and "copper." She asks, "How could they weigh the worth of you, so rare?" They would totally miss the fact that his love is precious beyond that of any precious metal or gem.

Is the speaker over-dependent on her lover-- that without him, she would have no light or warmth in her life, not even a will to live? Perhaps. But I don't think this song lapses into codependency-- it merely engages in the kind of exaggeration that typifies love songs. Would it be as powerful to say, "If your love were taken from me, I'd be upset for a long while, but fine in the long run, especially with my strong support system of friends and family?"

And what of Columbus-- did others reach the "New" World before he did? Historians seem to agree that this is the case. Nevertheless, it was Columbus-- not a nice man, by current scholarship-- whose voyages opened (what came to be known as) the Americas to interaction with the rest of the planet, and who established a base here whose descendants remain to this day.

Again, this heartfelt song is one of Vega's purest expressions of affection, and one of her just-plain-prettiest songs. Maybe if someone had felt like this about ol' Columbus, he would have just stayed home with her.


Next Song: Lolita