“I lay my head upon a bed of stone” could be interpreted as a Biblical reference to Jesus Christ saying, “Even the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58, Matthew 8:20). The context of that dialogue was a wealthy man who wanted to become Jesus’s disciple saying he would do anything to do so. (It was believed that following Jesus would lead to a glorious overcoming of the earth in the immediate future and those who chose to follow Him before that day would be hugely rewarded.) Jesus was warning this man that such perceived future wealth would have an earthly material cost, and that the man’s expectations may need realigned before he commits to his professed action (if indeed he does at all).
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This inverse relationship between a perceived wealth and a lived reality of poverty (be it socially, emotionally, or in Jesus’s case physically, as he was homeless) is echoed later in the song in the line, “Can a vagrant body be celestial?” Can you be holy, superior, or worthy of pursuit as an idol if you have nothing to show for your holiness? If your daily lived experience is mundane or average? Sumney, living alone in the middle of Los Angeles on the precipice of a career in musicianship, both exists in an isolated tower and in this mundanity (“Now the lights are never bright when I get home”).
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A possible interpretation of this theme in the context of Sumney’s many, many works investigating and declaring isolation (see “insula” and “and so I come to isolation” on his 2020 album “grae”, as the most obvious choices) and especially in the context of this 2014 album (all of which is debatably centered on the same subject) is concerning 1) his perception of those who admire him’s relationship with him and 2) his relationship to (rather than relationships with) the invisible lovers coming and going throughout his works, all of whom may not actually be people. If Sumney plays a messianic Moses in which assumptions and expectations are set and are found to be out of touch with a lived reality (as Jesus Christ did), it follows that he would have a similar relationship to his disciples: appreciative, unlikely reciprocative, insecure yet certain mentor to student, perhaps perceive their students as being wholly worshipful and desiring to replicate the idol, and most of all, utterly separate and Other. “A soul cannot be whole if only rogue,” Sumney writes. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” Jesus echoes. Against that backdrop, Mid-City Island is a work of expressive inward reflection and cynical, longing outward projection.