Fake Palindromes - here we go again!

After a few hours of intense brain-racking, here is my second attempt an analysis... this time with focus AND a conclusion. 

“Fake Palindromes” by Andrew Bird

The song „Fake Palindromes“ by Andrew Bird does not represent a coherent story but rather a series of conflicting emotions and images that evoke a deliberate feeling of ambiguity in the listener. The structure of the song is rather unorganized and strengthens the impression of a confused mind that is narrating. The song contrasts very dark and violent ideas with images and emotions connected to innocence and love. 

In the first stanza, the narrator addresses a “dewy-eyed disney bride”, a beautiful, naïve an innocent girl. This effect is strengthened by the use of imagery like “bright pair of shoes” and “knee high socks” in the second stanza. 

This innocent girl however has a dark secret to her, since she has distracting red lipstick on and is using the socks to hide signs of physical abuse (“what to cover a bruise”). This is only one part of the dark and eerie atmosphere that surrounds the positive images within the song. Already the second verse of the first stanza introduces the idea of “swapping blood with formaldehyde”, which means that the girl should have been murdered, even though the attempt failed. The narrator threatens the girl by saying that she should have died with “the monsters that talk, […] that walk the earth”, like she herself is some kind of monster. 

The second stanza underlines the fact that the girl is not as innocent as she seemed as first, since with the “old death kit” that she had wanted to use, she possesses a sort of weapon with which she had planned to kill someone, out of rage: “she has blood in her eyes for you”.  This rage and the planned homicide refer back to the fourth verse of the first stanza were “whiskey-plied voices cried fratricide”, which suggests that there has already been a murder of her brother to begin with, which was blamed on the girl. 

The third stanza begins with a completely opposing idea, that of maddening love, which is full of confliction emotions. Here, “singles ads” is a synonym for the search for true love which can be an emotional up and down: “they run you hot and cold”. However, the love is also strongly negatively connoted since it is followed by the imagery of having to bite on a towel to suppress one’s cry of pain from unrequited love and a broken heart. 

The last stanza picks up very concretely on the “single’s ads” by listing generic, average information that would appear in a lonely hearts ad. Again, this normalcy does not last long, because the ultimate aim of the advertiser is to “tie your wrists with leather and drill a tiny hole in your head”. The cruel, murderous intentions appear in almost every stanza and therefore dominate the whole atmosphere to a threatening and uneasy but still ambiguous overall picture.

The fact that the title “Fake Palindromes” hints at a deceit of the reader, who is expecting a hidden meaning that is not actually present, strongly suggests, that there is no clear message in Andrew Bird’s song. It evokes a feeling of unease in the listener due to its conflicting choice of vocabulary and topics as well as the irregularity of the rhyme scheme and the structure of the stanzas. It suggests an emotionally unstable narrator, who switches from addressing his victim directly to talking about her in the third person and even confuses vocabulary: “a rheostat, I mean a thermostat”. The song seems to mirror the dark and disturbed mind of the narrator which evokes a feeling in the listener that is comparable the unease of hearing a mad person’s thoughts. The only constant image is that of murder, death and pain, who are only connected to the other topic, love, because of the intensity of the emotions involved. 

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