Imaginaerum, Part Two

Previously in this blog, I admitted to being a Nightwish fan who doesn't care who the lead singer is so long as Tuomas Holopainen keeps writing his beautiful music and Marcus keeps growling into the microphone with the female singer at his side, singing with him so that you have that hard vocals/soft vocals mixture.  Then, I wrote about my interpretation of the first six songs of the album, Imaginaerum which has been turned into a movie to be released... whenever they get around to it.

Arabesque is the seventh song on the album and purely instrumental.  It was actually written for the movie.  As in, a specific scene in the movie needed an instrumental song and here it is.  I like to imagine you (the listener) are running away from that nightmarish sideshow run by The Devil and Mother Gaia gone bad.  However, since the story now follows nightmare logic, you have to run through a number of stories and ideas, mostly represented by 1,001 Arabian Nights.

You can imagine a completely different story.  Concept albums are easy for story insertion.  You could think Imaginaerum is about something completely different and you'll be right... but so will I.  In fact, the artists have been quoted with their story about the album and I'll post it at the end of the review and we'll see my opinion versus their Word of God.  How do you like them apples?


Turn Loose the Mermaids then brings Mother Gaia back to her old self and back to you.  She remembers the loving being she used to be, the woman who "check your teeth and warmed your toes".  It's the only genuine ballad on the concept album and it's really a beautiful song.  What I imagine is that while running away, you cross the desert and end up in a sea-side place where you see mermaids far in the distance.  Mother Gaia follows you and sees the mermaids as well, and it brings back all those things she wanted in "I Want My Tears Back".  A nightmare wasn't the thing that brought back the innocence and wonder of childhood, but the beautiful imaginary, mermaid, one of the oldest mythical creatures that have existed since people started taking ships (boats) to other worlds (other countries) does just that.  Back to herself, Mother Gaia reminisces about days long ago, a time of imagination when she took care of us and we learned the lessons she had to teach us.  Mother Gaia remembers when we were her children before humanity got jaded. 

Of course, the Devil isn't happy.  He had a full victory and Mother Gaia has turned on him and back to you.  He had Mother Gaia! She was his.  So, he makes his final bid, in Rest Calm.

Rest Calm, to me, is a final showdown between The Devil, who hates life and all the pain it brings, and Mother Gaia who understands that life has pain, but that life also has joy.  The Devil went to die.  He wants to die, but Mother Gaia doesn't want to die so he's stuck.  The reason he can't die is because this song, to me, finally reveals one important detail: you, Mother Gaia, and The Devil are all the same being.  The Devil can't die unless both you and Mother Gaia also choose to die or it's time.  And since two out of three won't see life the way he does, he's stuck.  This is why he's so angry.  This is why he howls in impotent rage at the despair life brings.  You can see that there is a connection between Mother Gaia and the Devil in the following lyrics:

"You are the moon pulling my black waters
You are the land in my dark closet
Stay by my side until it all goes dark forever
When silent the silence comes closer"

This set of lyrics is also important for a reason besides indicating the connection, the need for the Devil and Mother Gaia staying together.  It's also the moment where the Devil begins to see that life is good, it is wondrous and the memories, our story, gives life meaning.  The good that Mother Gaia and you see and the despair and hopelessness the Devil sees.  This is brought to light when Mother Gaia makes her final plea with the children's choir (who is you) singing with her.  Then the Devil joins in.  As Mother Gaia sang with the Devil when she agreed with him in "I Want My Tears Back", The Devil joins the song, singing the same lyrics Mother Gaia has been singing with him.  That's when I realized that we weren't just dealing with me, The Devil, and Mother Gaia, they're really Me, Animus, and Anima.

For those of you who don't know what Anima and Animus are, I'll give you the short explanation.  Every person has a bit of masculine and feminine in them.  All males have an Anima, and inner feminine.  All females have an inner Animus.  When a person fully accepts their anima or animus, they are thought to be comfortable with themselves and their sexuality.  In this case, I'm calling the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine by the words "Animus" and "Anima" because it's just easier for typing.  Fewer letters and it sounds prettier.

Now that every one's in agreement (in the song), they are ready to die when the time comes, but are ready to live life as they should until then... as seen in the next songs which are essentially about life, death , and acceptance to me.


 
This begins with "The Crow, The Owl and the Dove".  Though the title has only three birds, there are four: a crow, an owl, a dove and a swan.  This song is a complete duet between Mother Gaia and the Devil (Anima and Animus) in complete agreement and unity.  Each bird represents something:

Crow = Pride

Owl = Wisdom

Dove = Faith

Swan = Love

Each of these birds have something they could give to you (pride, wisdom, faith and love),  but those things aren't needed because you already have them and you know it.  What the characters need is innocence and truth because it's easy to lose sight of those things.

Now what's funny about this beautiful song is that Tuomas Holopainen didn't write it.  Marco Hietala wrote it for the album.  Yes, the metal head wrote one of the most beautiful songs of the album.  That's why Nightwish rocks.

Either way, to me, this song sends home the idea that the three characters we've been dealing with are one.  That is the truth you need.  You are Mother Gaia who loves life and sees a need to go down the river and leave a footprint on every island you see.  You are the Devil who is terrified of drowning in that river and yet longs for it because it will mean escape from the scary ride.  You need childlike innocence to view and appreciate life for all its nuances.  This album is about coming to terms with life!

Which brings us to the second-to-last lyrical song of the album, Last Ride of the Day.  Now, this song took me a while to understand because the music is really dramatic and somewhat foreboding, but the lyrics are... different.  Once you listen to the lyrics, you understand.  Once I understood, I loved this song.  It became my favorite on the album, no joke.  It also made me cry with joy.

Why?

This song is a celebration of life.  Look at the chorus:

"Riding the day, every day into sunset
Finding the way back home

Once upon a night we'll wake to the carnival of life
the beauty of this ride ahead such an incredible high
It's hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead
This moment the dawn of humanity
The last ride of the day..."

If the song evokes the image of a roller coaster, that's because it's supposed to.  Before, life was compared to a potentially dangerous river, now it's compared to the thrill of being on a roller coaster, and the song is awesome for it.  I listen to this song to get pumped for work.  I listen to this song to get pumped for writing.  I listen to this song to just get fracking pumped.  It gets that adrenaline going for no reason other than the fact that life is an amazing ride and you never know what could happen next and who would want to? 

 It's amazing!  It's joyful!  Yes, it is also terrifying, but that's part of the fun.   You know that innocence, those tears they were looking for earlier in the album?  Here they are! 

The song, however is also about death.  I mean, it's not just about any ride or every ride, it's about the last ride.  We are all on our life as far as we're concerned.  As far as we know, we only get one life to live so we have to enjoy it and accept that some day, the ride will end.  However, it hasn't ended yet, so why be so upset about death, the end of the ride, when there's so much life to live and enjoy?  And that there, that's acceptance!


And that brings us to the true crowning point of the album.  Before now the songs never went longer than eight minutes.  Song Of Myself, the second to last song of the album, the crowning point, the finale, clocks in at thirteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds long.  It is divided into four parts, each one pretty awesome for it's own reasons.  Nightwish is known for having multi-part songs.  Someday, I'll do a break down of Poet and the Pendulum to show you.

Part One of Song of Myself is instrumental, called "From a Dusty Bookshelf".  It's basically the intro, the build up.  "Last Ride of the Day" had this big finish that this song helps you both recover from and get build back up for the rest of this new song.  The choir is back in full force (it never really went away all album).  Which then leads you into Part Two, where Anette sings.

Part Two of Song of Myself is Anette's bit and it's called "All That Great Heart Lying Still".  It begins with something akin to a recap, but this recap goes beyond just the album you're listening to:

"The nightingale is still locked in the cage
The deep breath I took still poisons my lungs
An old oak sheltering me from the blue
Sun bathing on its dead frozen leaves

A catnap in the ghost town of my heart
She dreams of storytime and the river ghosts
Of mermaids, of Whitman's and the rideRaving harlequins, gigantic toys..."

A Nightingale locked in a cage is a reference to "The Escapist", a song from a version of the previously released album Dark Passion Play.  As this song is inspired by Walt Whitman's poem, "Song of Myself".  Now, those of you who like Walt Whitman can draw your own conclusions, I've never read his poetry so that leaves me clueless as to at least half the meaning and emotional impact of this song.

And you know that choir I've been commenting on throughout this album?  They finally have truly intelligible words!  "All that great heart lying still and slowly dying, All that great heart lying still on an angel wing!"  They cut in with this whenever Anette takes a breath before she continues to rock out.  That in conjunction with the only part that can really be considered a chorus:

"A song of me, a song in need
Of a courageous symphony
A verse of me, a verse in need
Of a pure heart singing me to peace"

This song is about music, about stories, like the rest of the album.  It's about how stories, songs, poetry is what creates us, it's what makes us real, human.  The Song of Myself is the song that is myself.  If that makes sense.  An the last verse of Part Two is particularly clever:

"Now all that great heart lying still
In silent suffering
Smiling like a clown until the show has come to an end
What is left for encore
Is the same old dead boy's song
Sung in silence"

This song, Song of Myself, is the encore of the album.  You are dying.  You're heart is lying still and slowly dying, but due to your realization, you are flying on the angel's wing.  Anima and Animus are going home and since you are part of them, you're going home too.  You are the Dead Boy... a character with a whole Nightwish song dedicated to him in the album Wishmaster and the song, "Dead Boy's Poem."  And since you are dead, you can't sing anymore, so your encore is sung in silence.  Clever.  By the way, Anette's voice roaring out of the speakers is amazing in this part.

Part Three is called Piano Black.  It begins when the drums and bass really kick in heavy and there's silence from Anette for a little while.  When she begins, she's singing much slower and there's fewer lyrics:

"A silent symphony
A hollow opus #1,2,3

Sometimes the sky is piano black
Piano black over cleansing waters

Resting pipes, verse of bore
Rusting keys without a door

Sometimes the within is piano black
Piano black over cleansing waters."



Now, I don't know a whole lot about music so some of this flies right over my head.  I do know that a silent symphony wouldn't do anyone a whole lot of good.  Most artists write something they call their "opus", like Stephen King's The Dark Tower series.  As an artist is supposed to throw everything they are into an opus, having it come out hollow and there be multiple opuses just sounds depressing.  I don't know about you.  It sounds like it is describing when art is empty, soulless, but I don't know where that's leading.  I do know that previously they sung about how stories read us real.  Actually, I think it's saying that just as we are empty without stories and poems, poems and stories and music are dead without us to understand and enjoy them.  It's basically returning to the initial statement and turning it back around to the way most people usually thinks of them.

Part Three ends with that choir singing its pair of lines a couple more times.  The self is dying and this is the extremely epic swan song!

Part Four of Song of Myself is simply called "Love".  It had music accompanied by various spoken-word quotes.  Enough to make a page of its own as I comment on every single one.  The quotes themselves seem like snippets of memories.  You know how supposedly life flashes before your eyes before you die? This is that in auditory form.  Each little snippet describes something witnessed from someone or may be something that a person in life has said.

One that really speaks to me is:

"How can you "just be yourself"
when you don't know who you are?
Stop saying "I know how you feel"
How could anyone know how another feels?"

It reminds me of so many conversations I've had with people about death and losing a loved one and conversations I've had with my friends about being myself. 

Another snippet is:

Dear child, stop working, go play
Forget every rule
There's no fear in a dream

I can't tell you how many times I've had a resident at work tell me something similar to that.  One resident would tell me to take a break and relax every once in a while after I laid him down to bed.  I never had the heart to tell him that I had just gotten off of a break before putting him to bed.

The best snippet (to me) is the last one:

"Careless realism costs souls

Ever seen the Lord smile?
All the care for the world made Beautiful a sad man?
Why do we still carry a device of torture around our necks?
Oh, how rotten your pre-apocalypse is
All you bible-black fools living over nightmare ground

I see all those empty cradles and wonder
If man will ever change

I, too, wish to be a decent man-boy but all I am
Is smoke and mirrors
Still given everything, may I be deserving

And there forever remains the change from G to E-Minor"

This actually speaks to my views of religion.  So many people wear cross necklaces.  My mom has a lot of them.  It's a beautiful show of faith.  But, it is a little weird how Jesus died  to save humanity and we wear the device that tortured and murdered him around our necks as a sort of symbol of unity, pride, and faith.  The very implication actually makes me shiver a bit because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be happy if my followers wore that as a symbol of their faith in me.  Not to mention that the Romans killed a lot of people that way, not just Jesus and it was horrible.  That way of dying was a torture.  It was slow, it was on display for everyone to see.  Oh, and the position one is in when one is crucified?  Yeah, the lungs seize up after a while, so if the pain doesn't kill you and you're arms don't blessedly dislocate quick, I'm pretty sure you suffocate to death and then spill your bowels all over the crowd.

And Christians wear a symbol of that.  They have it in most churches.  They place it in their homes.

The second part, however, is very different.  It doesn't just criticize a religion, it talks about how, despite not being Christian, the speaker still wants to be decent, even if he's not real, he wants to deserve to be real, deserve to have life and all its wonders.  To me, that is amazing and it speaks to me in a weird sort of way.

Now onto the very last line of the song, "And there forever remains the change from G to E-Minor".  I had to look this up because it's the last lyric in the song and I didn't understand it.  It was an enigma, just something that was probably deep and flying straight over my head.  I don't like to feel like things are flying over my head.  So I looked it up like a good little nerd and learned something about music. G and E-minor are parallel music scales.  The two pitches are actually two side of the same coin as G usually appears in joyful songs while E-minor is usually relegated to sad songs.  In one lyric,  Tuomas managed to encompass the main thing that I kept saying about the album earlier.  In life, in every human there are joyful things and sad things.  It's all one.  Love life because life is joy, but you can only experienced the joy to the fullest if you've had sadness in your life.  Get it?

The final song, Imaginaerum, was also written for the movie as a song for the credits.  It's basically a mixture of the instrumentals from previous songs and, though enjoyable, sounds like something meant to be played while the credits rolled.  As in, I picture the credits rolling when listening to the song, "X songs written by Tuomas Holopainen" and all that.  It's pretty for a rehash of the whole album, but to me it adds very little and mostly is a way to calm down after the emotional roller coaster that is this album.

Now, the interpretation in the artists' words:

"Imaginaerum tells the story of an elderly composer, Tom, who suffers from severe dementia. As he has had the disease for years and has regressed into childhood, he remembers practically nothing from his adult life. His music, friends, all his past including the memory of his daughter are a blur in his fragile mind. All he has left is the imagination of a ten-year-old boy. As he drifts away into coma, it seems impossible to get back what he has lost. Tom travels through his imaginary world seeking answers and finding memories, while his daughter, Gem, tries to recover the bond she had once shared with her father in the real world. As they have become more and more distant from each other over the years, and as there's even greater obstacles separating them now — Tom's coma and his imminent death — Gem's project feels doomed to failure. However, through Tom's darkest secrets, Gem discovers the path she must follow in order to find her father again."

It is different from my personal interpretation.  I expected that.  In fact, I've read that blurb before when I first found out about the album.  Then I listened to the album repeatedly and got my own interpretation of it based on my experiences.  I encourage everyone to do just that.  Music is universal and some of the themes I found may carry over to other people.  However, I probably missed many themes or potential themes and that's cool.  I just wanted to give my enjoyment and the way I enjoy it to other people and let them discover their own joy if they can.  This song actually came at the tale end of a pretty tough time for me and made me feel better about my situation.  If one person listens to this album and gets the same feeling of peace and fullness that I got, then my job is done.  If you think I'm full of crap, well, that's okay too.

This is Hanorah's Words and I'm signing out.

Sweet Dreams.