Decrypting "Flightless Bird, American Mouth"

(Check it out on YouTube).Some like it, some don't. Most are repelled by the lyrics, I think. Baffling. I think they're brilliant. What do they mean, though? Well, having just come off my little commentary on the somewhat subjective, entirely personal issue of textual interpretation, I'll have to qualify by saying I suppose it depends on the context of its presentation. Cop out? No way! There's a few possibles I see in this one, but I'll stick with the stage the movie's music supervisor and director chose...love. The visual of the lovers' dance in the movie's final frames juxtaposed with the lyrics is irrevocable: I'd summarizeby saying my rendering is that the song is about hunger to know self that is realized, then threatened, then sated. Here's a peek at the lyrics by Iron & Wine (aka Samuel Beam):

I was a quick wet boy, diving too deep for coins

All of your street light eyes wide on my plastic toys

Then when the cops closed the fair, I cut my long baby hair

Stole me a dog-eared map and called for you everywhere

Have I found you

Flightless bird, jealous, weeping or lost you, american mouth

Big pill looming

Now I'm a fat house cat

Nursing my sore blunt tongue

Watching the warm poison rats curl through the wide fence cracks

Pissing on magazine photos

Those fishing lures thrown in the cold

And clean blood of Christ mountain stream

Have I found you

Flightless bird, grounded, bleeding or lost you, american mouth

Big pill stuck going down

The first four lines depict a young man, simple in maturity but complex in life experience who wants more, perhaps more than he can get (wet, slick boy diving too deep for coins). Then he meets a gal who's euphemistically "out of his league" (she's the coins)whose insight makes him feel exposed as an undeveloped charlatan (street light eyes, plastic toys). But keeping her will take some changes, changes he makes by growing up and pursuing her path -- a path he's less than comfortable with since it's as foreign to him as it is frightening. And he wonders if he's found "the one": the soul mate who won't abandon him, but stay forever lest he be broken, jealous, or alone (flightless bird). If that can happen, it will defy common opinion, interpretation, even everyday expectations (american mouth). And he'll be good...redeemed...purifed.

Of course, getting the girl makes him deliciously happy (fat house cat), but leaves him restless (nursing a sore blundt tongue), wanting some part of him he had to abandon (watching the rat to his cat). In resisting the temptation to revert to an old self -- a self he's tempted to define as "truer" -- he's casting off cultural nee-sayers and doubters (pissing on magazine photos) that incite him to be what he does not want (fishing lures), to become again what he once was. Giving in to popular misgivings and speculations that no one ever really changes would mean releasing a sense of newfound purity in this love discovery (clean blood of Christ mountain stream)...a choice he won't make because he has a newer, better sense of himself. Indeed, he has found a flightless bird, not only in his lover, but in the presence of a renewed, redeemed self. Of course, no change -- however good and true -- is easy.

That is the price of choosing the wicked to begin with...it's the big pill stuck going down.