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Thom Yorke is speaking directly to youth, the encouraging them to create. You’re young and handsome, after all, and have the ability to do anything you want.
-Thom Yorke in 1993, which was one of Radiohead’s formative years
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The ingénue is a stock character in literature, film, and a role type in the theatre; generally a girl or a young woman who is endearingly innocent and wholesome. Ingenue may also refer to a new young actress or one typecast in such roles. The term comes from the French adjective ingénu meaning “ingenuous” or innocent, virtuous, and candid. The term may also imply a lack of sophistication and cunning. Thom might be speaking of his daughter, who is young and still pure and innocent.
Actress Marie Pickford
Ingénue |ˈanjəˌnoō; ˈän zh-|
noun
an innocent or unsophisticated young woman.
• a part of this type in a play.
• an actress who plays such a part.
You're bringing me down
You stood and you watched as
My baby left town The New Vaudeville Band – Winchester Cathedral
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Dating back to 1079, the Winchester Cathedral is one of the largest cathedrals in the world and features the tallest nave in all of Europe.
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What is this?
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Thomas Mars' girl always “puts on a show” when they’re out together with friends. She acts all sweet and courteous, but Mars' friends know who she really is when they’re not around: a cold-hearted tease.
This song is likely about a woman Mars met before his lovely wife, filmmaker Sofia Coppola:
Mars is also alluding to the feeling of being in public and having people know your personal life story (like for example that sofia was married to spike jonez, or the fact that they have 2 kids, etc). That the entertainment industry postulates and speculates on their relationship and seems to know his life and his feelings better than himself (as I am doing here).
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Phoenix’s Thomas Mars compares the nature of a high-octane relationship that starts to plummet fast to a stereo volume knob turning the music way down.
We’re going out on a limb here and postulating that this couple’s relationship isn’t turned up to 11 anymore.
Considering he didn’t rush into marriage (he married Sofia Coppola after their second child) I think he’s moved past any kind of ‘honey-moon’ period of delusional happiness. He’s seen this woman have two kids and still wants to be with her, he’s in love. Mars could possibly referencing escaping from a public life and just letting go and tuning everything and everyone else out.
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'Cross the water and home through the town
Past the shadows that fall down wherever we meet
Pretty soon now, I won't come around Counting Crows – Sullivan Street
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In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue
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Montague Street (named after prominent feminist/activist Lady Mary Wortley Montegu) is a principal shopping and residential thoroughfare in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, where there was a music venue called Capulet’s, which was a local favorite of Bob Dylan.
Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monore are amongst the known residents of this now gentrified Brooklyn quarter.
‘Revolution in the air’ is an obvious allusion to the 60’s – counterculture, trying to change things, be politically active.
Then came the lawyers, and then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the telegraph road Dire Straits – Telegraph Road
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In an interview on RockLine, a “rock radio network” call-in show, broadcast live on 10 May 1983, Mark Knopfler stated, while on tour, he… “in fact was driving down that road and I was reading a book at the time called Growth of the Soil (by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun), and I just put the two together. I was driving down this Telegraph Road… and it just went on and on and on forever, it’s like what they call linear development. And I just started to think, I wondered how that road must have been when it started, what it must have first been. And then really that’s how it all came about yeah, I just put that book together and the place where I was, I was actually sitting in the front of the tour bus at the time.”
Telegraph Road
15,700