Instant of the Hour After

This is a rare track. It can be found on Volume 3 of the mostly acoustic "Close Up" series of remixes.

It seems to be about a drunk couple fighting, and she is trying to wind it down so they can sleep: "That's enough out of you tonight, my darling... I detest all this drunken brawling/ Now, let's see if you can make it into this bed." Probably, though, he can: "You're not as drunk as you seem."

Still, they are "trapped here inside of this bottle." Both of them are trapped by the alcoholism, although it's unclear if she is also an alcoholic or 'only' someone who qualifies for Al-Anon.

As for the fight itself, it must have been quite the circus, but now, "The show is over/ The monkey is dead."

She is of two minds about her significant other: "How I love you/ How I loathe you." To the degree she does love him, it comes in waves so peaked that they become spikes: "It's a sharp, quick love."

Something casts a "sweet shadow" on his "cheek." Perhaps he did make it into bed, and these are the blankets she tenderly draws up over him. And he doesn't seem to calm down and ease into sleep, but rather simply 'conk out' suddenly from a state of stress: "The pulse in your neck, how I'll know it, right to the end."

Alternately, these images could be of love-making. The "sharp, quick love" could be him entering her, the "sweet shadow" could be of her face on his, and the "end" could be his climax.

This seems less likely, however, considering his words, which sound like those of a literary critic: "Reverberating acuity... lousy simile... vacant majesty." These sound like the ramblings of a drunk intellectual as he drifts off. And one who didn't like what he'd just read or heard, at that.

Of course, they could have made love and then he passed out muttering.

Yet another possibility is that the song is about her critics, and she is only using the relationship image as a metaphor.

The next "hour" passes like an "instant." And in that moment, she realizes "Right now/ It's you and me."

This is where the image being trapped in a bottle of liquid comes in. Of course, they'd have to be small to be trapped in a bottle, so she imagines them as "flies" who are "drowning" in the liquid.

"When the frenzy's over"-- the fighting, the sex, or both-- "We're crawling specimens/ Spent and exhausted/ We press to the sides" of the "bottle."

She knows she has to do something about the situation. But the situation itself is simply too exhausting, physically and emotionally, for her to plan and enact such an escape.

A nearly drowned fly may know it has to leave the bottle in order to prevent himself from nearly drowning again, but right now he's too drained from just having nearly drowned to figure out where the bottle's opening is and how to get there.


Next Song: Daddy is White