Album Rating: 5.0
This is my most favorite album of all time.
I don't usually like that guy on lyric interpretation websites (or songmeanings), who takes the
annoyingly analytic view, but I feel like I have to point something out that everybody has missed:
Assuming Kate is well-read (she has to be), this entire album is a platonic allegory. The first
side, A Sea of Honey, is the particulars and the material world. It is intensely focused on the
particulars, like pi, washing machines, and mothers.
The second side, A Sky of Honey, is the universals, "the things above", the spiritual world, Plato's
Forms, or God.
Both are sweet. But can both be described?
The first album, everything is made plain. It is about her mother, it is about a man obsessed with
pi, it is about Elvis and the corruption that material brings. It is clinging and down to earth.
The second part, nothing is clear. It's messy and all the colors are running. What she is attempting
to describe cannot be. She can't even understand the messengers of the sky - the birds - but she
sings along, anyway. A Sky of Honey is her journey throughout life, until she reaches that final
climax of death, where she gets up on the roof, grabs for the birds, and laughs with them...
just like Socrates, who embraced death, to finally be with the Forms, Kate embraces the birds, to
finally laugh with them - and not caring a damn what anyone else thinks.
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