I'll be truthful -- I didn't really care for this song at first -- on the surface, it sounded like a Christmas carol meets an Ode to the Who. But over the last several weeks, it's been my favorite song, in large part because of the imagery that both the lyrics and music evoke. I'm referring to the song "Feel it turn", by Great big Sea.
Now, I'll preface the next few paragraphs with the confession that in college, the first major that I declared was English -- and I secretly wondered what the authors of the works we were studying would think of all that was being interpreted into their writing by scholars. What if the author didn't think that his characters were metaphors for anything? That he was just writing a story? This is the interpretive line that I now walk with GBS.
The first lyric in this song that I could visualize was "Cut steel wired into water; Fixed link, circumnavigate". It made me think of the longitude and latitude lines across a globe.
The next lyric that caught my visual attention was "I can see the earth below me; and I can feel it turn". I envisioned the author on a mountaintop, somewhere far North, say in Newfoundland or Greenland, with arms outstretched to his sides, head thrown back -- literally feeling on top of the world -- both invigorated and happy.
And most recently, I've seen something in the music -- the notes that open the song (what I'd previously thought of as the Christmas carol notes) struck me today as falling leaves, turning into falling snow. That's not hard to figure out; in my real world, it's Autumn in New England, and the trees are glorious reds, yellows, and oranges set against a blustery sky. So all around me, it looks and feels like Fall, but what it sounds like is Great Big Sea :)