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Movie on your eyelids

I've just found this b-side song for the Battle for the sun album a few days ago and I fell in love with it right away. It stuck me like a lightning. I'm no musician, so I don't know the technical background of how a song builds up, I can give just my impressions and thoughts about songs and now about this particular one. I always loved such soft, instrumental, lyrical songs - and the more the pain and hopelessness is present in such a song, the better it is for me. Maybe I'm a masochist, but I like such songs - they inspire me in writing, translating or drawing and wakes lots of thoughts in my head, twisting my emotions, making my heart sink and ache, but I love it that songs can do this to me. If you like they can shoot right into the middle of my heart and feelings. I have a few such Placebo songs, but this one is somehow more special among them, but I’ll write later about that.

First I usually listen to “the whole of a song” - not paying close attention on the lyrics, but watching the feelings it can evoke in me, the way the music works with the lyrics. (Of course I catch a few lines even when I'm not focusing on doing so.) And when the song catches me I look at the lyrics more closely.

In this b-side song the music was absolutely love at first "sight"! I'm in love with the sound of pianos - especially in such slow pieces. Then the "singing" part came - which is obviously more like telling a story on a low tone. It made me shiver right away - I like it when someone "sings" this way, deep tones always make me crazy. :)

The situation the lyrics draw for me is a very familiar picture. The whole text makes it easy to imagine, to FEEL the situation. That someone sitting on the edge of a bed smoking, watching that other person sleeping in bed, dreaming of someone else. I interpret it as a relationship which is getting cold, the sitting person realizing that it's over, but he/she isn't willing/wanting to accept this. The pain of this realization is palpable. I can smell the smoke floating towards the ceiling, I can see the room lit by soft blue shades thanks to the moon or some lamps outside the street. Blue - a word with lots of meanings in English. This time - in my head - it emphasizes the cold and sad feelings the sitting person has and symbolizes the dead emotions or relationship between the couple. As the lyrics go on, I sense that there are more reasons he/she wants to stay with the sleeping person. Of course he (I imagine the sitting person as a 'he' because of Brian's voice and of course because he wrote and sings the song :D) sees/knows that she isn't dreaming of him, but he wants to be the one again:

“I smoke a dozen cancer sticks
Imagine there are two or three ways
To make you love me
And not dream of someone else
Become the movie on your eyelids”

There’s longing in the way he watches her/him sleeping „I always watch you when you're dreaming / Because I know it's not of me / The reflection of yourself”. The relationship is over, he’s crying there. Some hints from other parts of the lyrics and a feeling just whispers into my head that he’s addicted to her – still. And it doesn’t matter how she’d treated him, he still wants her. But he doesn’t plan to take her back with force (it wouldn’t happen especially if he was the submissive one in the relationship). These lines seem to me more like a chain of thoughts. Musing, sitting over the remains of a past relationship. They are still in the same room, but the love’s gone. They don’t belong to each other anymore. Brian’s voice is resigned as if he was over a long period of battling and suffering inside. Useless attempts to win her back. He sounds resigned and sad about that and of course hurt, bruised - he’s crying. Maybe mourning these fruitless attempts and their relationship or just being sick and tired of everything. Even he has a separate life/world by now: “we're both living somewhere else”. He repeats that he wants to become the movie on her eyelids again. Well, a movie can mean a chain of memories too. For me it can be interpreted as whishing her to dream about their relationship which becomes soon just a memory. A hint of revenge can be detected here too in my eyes (because usually dreams of past relationships aren’t pleasant ones), but mainly – I think – he just wants to get back into her head and life. But who knows? A song or this song can mean completely different things to each individual. I have more interpretation as well – I just have to think of another (life)situation I’m in and the song’ll mean something else already. 

So this little “summary” or “review” I wrote is just my general point of view of this wonderful song, sticking to the expressive lyrics. Having very strong and visual pictures in the lyrics is one of the causes I like Placebo so much.

As I was listening to this song in the kitchen, preparing something for breakfast, a thought came into my mind along with a feeling I couldn’t identify since a few days. Maybe it’ll sound a bit stupid, but I think I love this song with its soft, ethereal and dark melodies, because while listening to this I had this feeling that I know this song from somewhere (and I’m absolutely sure that I hadn’t heard it before!), that this song is one of the long-lost melodies of my soul.

Strange thought, huh? But I still feel like this and it makes me happy and somehow calm and moved in the same time. I know that this isn’t a classical song-review, I just had these thoughts in my head that I wanted to write out of my system. This is one of the ways I interpret this wonderful b-side song.

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