"Fake Palindromes" - An Attempt at an Analysis

The song "Fake Palindromes" by Andrew Bird is by far one of the most peculiar songs I have listened to in the past months. The meaning of it is hard, if not impossible, to pin down and therefore I greatly exceeded the 300-word limit. Before I destroy all my eloquent ideas in the shortening process, here's the entire version.

For a definition of fake palindromes or "Famlindromes" check: http://falindrome.com/, the page of Amir Blumenfeld, who is posting a new falindrome each day.

Listen to the song on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U7xpGi5SsU

"Fake Palindromes" by Andrew Bird

My dewy eyed, Disney bride what has tried
Swapping your blood with formaldehyde
Monsters, whiskey-plied voices cried fratricide
Jesus, don't you know that you coulda died?
You should have died with the monsters what talk
Monsters what walk the earth

And she's got red lipstick, and a bright pair of shoes
And she's got knee high socks, what to cover a bruise
She's got an old death kit, she's been meaning to use
She's got blood in her eyes, in her eyes for you
She's got blood in her eyes for you

Certain fads, stripes and plaids, some singles ads
They run you hot and cold like a rheostat I mean a thermostat
So you bite on a towel, hope it won't hurt too bad
My dewy eyed, Disney bride what has tried
Swapping your blood with formaldehyde
With the monsters what talk, monsters what walk the earth

She says, I like long walks and sci-fi movies
You're six foot tall and East coast bred
Some lonely night we can get together
And I'm gonna tie your wrists with leather
And drill a tiny hole into your head
And I'm gonna drill a tiny hole into your head

   The song Fake Palindromes by Andrew Bird evokes confused and uncertain feelings in me that I can’t quite pin down.

   First of all, its rhyme scheme is unusual since it has a rhyme at the end of each verse in the chorus: “formaldehyde”, “fratricide”, “died”, but also within the first verse:  “-eyed”, “bride”, “tried”. This adds to the general feeling of confusion and eeriness.

   The vocabulary used conveys a dark, negative picture. This is contrasted with the of the „dewy-eyed disney bride” which might refer to a corruption of innocence through violence.  Swapping the blood of a human being with formaldehyde can be seen as a reference to death following the aforementioned killing since it is common to preserve corpses with formaldehyde.

   The “monsters that talk, monsters that walk the earth” are, in my opinion, humans. They are monster-like in their character traits but appear to be normal on the outside since they talk and live like normal human beings but are evil on the inside and as scary as monsters.

   The next stanza is talking about a woman that is not directly spoken to but only mentioned as “she”. This woman is using make-up and clothing to hide her “bruise”, possibly a metaphor for hiding one’s hurt feelings under a façade of some kind.

   The “old death kit” that this woman wants to use could be a weapon of some kind, maybe to get revenge on a partner who left her for whom she has “blood in her eyes”, which means she is shedding blood instead of tears, another dark and obscure image. 

   The fact that the narrator seemingly addresses some other person could also stem from the fact that another person is narrating here and maybe talking about the “dewy-eyed disney bride” from the chorus as “she” and the “you” might be the narrator of the chorus. If one follows this line of interpretation, the last stanza is told from the same perspective, since it talks about this “she” as well and also a “you”, but it includes the narrator as a third person who wants to kill one or both of them by drilling a “hole in “your” head after tying the wrists of either “you” or “you and her” together, it is not entirely clear who is meant here, but the confusion it creates is deliberate. The listener gets lost in a feeling of unease, danger and violence. Death threats appear twice in the song as well as an allusion to torture: “so you bite on a towel, hope it won’t hurt so hard”. 

   The song does not seem to tell a coherent story, it rather offers a series of strange and threatening emotions, mostly negative ones. These emotions are lost love and hurt feelings that are combined with motives like homicide, torture and corruption of innocence.

   Maybe the title “Fake Palindromes” already points the listener in the right direction, since palindromes are words that can be read forwards and backwards. In this case the palindromes are fake, so they only appear to be readable from both sides. This means that the reader is being deceived because he assumes the given words to be a palindrome and oversees the minor differences. This might imply that the song doesn’t actually have the meaning one wants to see in it, maybe it has no meaning at all but rather conveys certain emotion without actually spelling out a theme behind the words. 

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