My Acolyte Journey: 2014.5

Heavenly Father.
Bon Iver. This song rivals many of my favorites for being utter gibberish. The religious references are tired and useless, the imagery is confusing, and the word's message is almost banal. "It's definitely lava," the singer sighs, and we're left wondering what exactly is lava? The relationship? His father? There's no context and the pronoun leaves me empty. I didn't understand the song the third time I read through it, and lyric genius is no help. This one was annotated by a drunk sloth. I had to struggle to find what meaning there was.
So I read the song backwards.
It's better. Listen, I don't know what the songwriter was thinking when he wrote these lyrics, but either it is gibberish and I'm sane or it's genius and I'm missing something. I want to assume the writer wasn't throwing refrigerator magnets at a whiteboard and writing down what stuck. Look carefully. "A safety, in the end, is all that he offers: Heavenly Father." It makes more sense than reversed. Now we know that the Heavenly Father is nothing more than a single point of safety for the singer. Let's go forward expecting him to seek that safety and slip from it, pointlessly, because it's not complex enough for his needs. He spends forever "up here" (heaven? I don't think so?) filling his time with fear. We learn that his loved one left him and that's why he's depressed. He let her go. "You turn around now and you count to 10, but you're free now, 'cause I'm a known coward in a coward wind." He's not going to chase. "Won't you settle down baby here your love has been! And I'm free now. I was never sure how much of you I could let in, but you're free now." He gives back the love and explains why he's letting go. He gives permission for the other person to leave. "And I don't need to go where a Bible went ever since I heard the howlin' wind." He feel a need to follow a Bible when he's such a coward. That coward wind has pushed him right out of the safety of the Heavenly Father.
Yet I know I'm trying too hard. The author wrote "Heard about a day where it dropped the know/to go another day as we learn to close," which makes no sense forward or backward. He wrote "Heavenly Father/is whose brought to his Autumn/and love is left in end." That's corroborated by two websites. I don't think it's a spelling error. I'm trying too hard and I wanted to find meaning but it's not there. It is gibberish.

I think it's "'Heavenly Father' is who's brought to his Autumn" and "I've been up here filling holes with fears," but that's clearly wrong. It's "whose" and "hulls." I hate lyrics transcribers today. Ignore me.

I think I demand too much of my music. It's like: Heavenly Father is perfectly serviceable. It even sets a beautiful picture in my mind. It's a moodscape and it does its job. But I constantly expect the words to mean something. Am I out of my mind? Did I get hit in a soft spot as a child and I'm left wanting desperately to make connections with the random jumble of words some man I've never met is singing so passionately and so hollowly? I feel like this song may have broken me, and I don't know what to say. I've never seen the movie the song was written for (Zach Braff), and maybe a lot of the references like "lava" and "wind" would make sense if I had, but I don't want to. I want a song that holds itself up. I want a song that helps me somehow after I've listened to it. And if that's unfair because I liked the video games Dear Esther and The Graveyard. Maybe I've just been programmed so well to look for meaning in lyrics and poetry by my academic upbringing that I'm missing something elemental and foundational in this work.

Or maybe the lyricist who wrote this piece was a drunk sloth. We may never know.