Being broken means you have wronged others. It means you did so willingly and were not forced when another placed a gun to your head. It means you did not do so during a time of war, when another was issuing commandments. It means you had a choice to sit alone and meditate or to play a sport, or to sing to yourself, or to play chess alone or draw or to do math and instead of all the world gives everyone you chose to hurt another or yourself or both. This is what it means to be a broken person. It could even mean you went even beyond this and built a shield by first looking at how those whom are not broken behave in order to get away with your brokenness as you are aware that harming others is, unfortunately, punished by those whom are differently broken than the criminals themselves. We all obviously know that punishment is not ever to be the way a human being is ever treated. But seeing as most authorities, including the ones in Canada, are constituted of broken individuals who do not understand at all how to help others, we have to grasp that those who are broken but are not part of authorities or enforcement types are trying to prevent themselves from being broken further while satisfying their broken urges. In other words, an alcoholic seeks to drink without ending up in prison, so when faced with an alcohol detector might say he is on medication that causes the detector to give a false positive (as is the case with certain medications). Having learned this lie the alcoholic might even go the length of convincing a doctor to diagnose him with this condition so he has the prop at the time of the alcohol test. This is how broken a person can be and how far they might go in convincing the authorities whom themselves are broken and seek to punish the alcoholic with prisons and other means of their innocence, or of their worthiness to not be further broken. This song is precisely describing this duality, though not about alcoholism, but about love, dating, romance, and the interactions between men and women that can make heaven and hell wage war upon war. Conjure One’s smash hit is deceptively beautiful, the way love can be and yet it is ugly and thus has a sad connotation via slightly minor chords and themes phased into soft and happy almost uplifting vibes that give one a peaceful lulling zen like experience and yet a down feeling. Tears From The Moon, the very title itself, tells you that something so bad happened, that the moon itself was crying. Must be terrible, must be wrong, must be something you want to hear about and learn from and not ever experience. If the moon, made of cheese, that which we all love, is crying, then someone was harmed, a crime was done, an evil was present, and through music we can tell you all how to heal and how to avoid it. With Tears, Conjure One, sings us a future without these problems, or at least alerts us of the possibility of the broken people, thusly made broken by already broken societal machineries as even existing in peaceful and loving places like Canada. And the more we know the better off we are, right? Well, that is, if we ourselves are not broken and can understand what the explanations mean. But if we ourselves are broken, then no amount of education, even at the Ph.D. level will ever help us or the world around us. A broken doctor drinking to deal with stress is just as dangerous behind a car wheel as a high school drop out, is he not? As is a Christian church going woman.
The opening line explains a stressful or guilty situation. The person couldn’t sleep so they went out walking. Most people do not write this line because they ate a lot, or because they over slept. Insomnia in music is often a reference to a problem one is trying to solve. Then what was done during the walk is obvious, they were thinking about their loved one and remembering the conversation. Clearly something very pivotal occurred that not only did they have to get out of the house to think, a sign of truly huge issues needing resolving, but the fact they remember the conversation implies it was that problematic. Do you remember every conversation at a video game party? Or silly banter at the movies? Or even a joke during a Netflix stream? Probably not because they aren’t monumentally life altering. So the lyrics so far have told us a world shaking event took place and thus we are primed to grasp the rest. This is important as Conjure One has explained in but ten words all of this. The next two lines are quite simple and further amplify the severity of the issues between these two love birds. Their mind is full of everything that should have been said but was not at the time. Clearly explaining why the walk was needed - time passed since the issue, quiet time, loud time, busy time, meditative time, and the mind was full of everything that could have given peace to all involved except for what was actually said and what actually took place. This is why the phrase is “echo now inside my head”. For everything else but what actually took place, all that was said and done, anything but these things would have been better. Otherwise the lyric could have been “I said it slightly wrongly phrased” as opposed to “all the things I should have said”. The phrase “all the things” means there isn’t just a slight change in a word here and there or an attenuation or amplification of meaning, but that there was a plethora, or thousands upon thousands of better things than what was actually said. In other words it was an emotionally driven argument where the two parties probably harmed each other irrevocably so and the voice of the lyrics is explaining it.
The next line says the person feels love is not fair, which it is. But it explains how their life was this whole time. It seems to imply they had trouble with love for a long time and not just in this one instance. It doesn’t say “love with you” or “this love” but “love” in general not being fair. Love as an emotion is addressed, love as a feeling, not love with one specific moment and person. They are stating that love as a whole is not fair, in other words, they had lots of love, and are an expert on it’s fairness and have judged it to be unfair. As opposed to a man whom never had any love whom might have written “love I know not of for I never had any but I hear it may be worth heavens themselves or avoided entirely”. I am not the best at lyrics and my music has none, but I think the general idea is there. The next three lines explain possibly how the victim of the argument felt. They say that the other side was in love while the voice of the lyrics felt nothing, was numb, apathy set in, and they were loved for nothing, a waste of emotions. The next two lines are important so I will quote them. “I would have done anything for you. I still love you, baby, I adore you”. This is also what the victim is quoted as saying and the voice of the lyrics is repeating for us to know what they heard and what was echoing in their mind during their walk. The person whom they argued with said to them that after the fighting the other side said they would have done anything if only love lasted, and that despite all this pain and suffering inflicted upon them, that they still love them. They still want it to work out, they still want it to be love, but well, darn, they are feeling nothing, they are numb. In other words, two sides to love, and one will do anything even tolerate pain while the other is numb and feelingless. And thus love can not actually exist and that is why the previous setup was that love is not fair. The person saying it not to be fair is the one who has no feelings for the other whom is saying they will do anything and still love the person who has no feelings back for them. This is a terrible situation for it means someone is madly in love with a broken person so broken they feel nothing when loved. And that usually means a very terrible psychological condition and a lot of pain endured at some point along the way, or at least an issue within oneself.
Now imagine these two people fighting viciously, with words obviously, throwing arguments, losing their tempers, forgetting their boundaries and where to draw lines, maybe even smashing a dish or breaking a TV or a hole in the wall being punched in. Imagine they argued for hours and hours, and tried very hard to calm each other down and then broke apart. Imagine if the person whom said they would do anything, the one who is not numb and the one who is still in mad love, if they insulted the numb person by saying “You are sad. You cheated on me. That is pathetic. I loved you all my life and gave you everything I could and you did this to us!”. Imagine that the man was the one who cheated on the woman, as it is a woman’s voice singing. And imagine if the woman feels nothing because she thought she was in love and yet she slept around or even just once and now she doesn’t know what her emotions mean. If she was in love how could she allow herself to cheat? And if she cheated, it means she was never in love? And if she went through this many times, then she would be numb and lack feelings of love. But if the man was not like this and never cheated, he would love her no matter what, thus the earlier line of “I would do anything for you”. Now a woman in this situation might have an issue. Does she resolve her conflicted nature by stating that she has a problem and needs counselling? Does she confide in her female circle? Does she seek help from books, Internet and therapists? Does she simply shrug it off and say like always she will start a new relationship when she falls into deeper and deeper love with another man? Perhaps if she was drawn to cheating and adultery, perhaps this wasn’t real love just an illusion? For if it was real love, there would be no way that she would have cheated, right? Real love means nobody else could draw you away, and in fact there is a song with this very lyric “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away” is quite a popular line sang long ago. Meaning I am so in love that all the temptations that would drive others and maybe even me in the past, can not even compare. In fact that very line is also popular in another track as sang by a woman again as “Nothing compares... to you”. Nothing implies nothing at all, not even heavens themselves, not even crime, not even a million dollars, nothing. So if a woman lost this kind of love that the man is feeling for her, and to him it is that powerful of a feeling, then she would have a hard time grasping why for her it is not, and clearly it is not, for if it were how could she have cheated? How could she have broken the heart of a man that amazing and wonderful? It would require of her to blame herself, for clearly the man’s love and mind are not the problem, and clearly she has to say to herself she is a bad person for harming him. But she doesn’t wish to accept this reality. So she went for a walk, because she knows she is not a bad person, she didn’t go into the relationship to harm him and yet he stooped due to her affair so low as to insult her by calling her “sad and pathetic”. Though only sad is quoted in the lyrics for pathetic would not be the appropriate vibe. Sad is right in this lyrical set of words because the emotions conveyed by the music with the presence of minor chords is somewhat evocative of sadness even though the song is overall uplifting or can be seen as such due to the dance-like architecture of the sounds and rhythms.
So the woman walked and thought. Walked and imagined. Rattled her mind. And looking at the modern landscape thought of a solution. She snapped. Got angry. Angry at herself, angry at the world. Angry at it all. Feminism is there. Oppression is everywhere. We are in love while the world burns? No. It can not be. He is one of them, too? Ahh, and finally her mind breaks even more and she enters the realm of anything is possible, anything and everything becomes open to her on this plateau of cosmic hyperdimensionality. She now can imagine everything and she will pick only that solution making her innocent. It does not matter what reality is. It does not matter what he feels. She is not well, she can not sleep, she needs to find peace, and peace involves not feeling bad about oneself. She wants to return home to her bed, and thus is looking only for that solution and not the right solution. The right solution may involve a person not sleeping well or not feeling good about one’s actions. But a happy solution and one of innocence makes one sleep well at night even if the world around themselves burns. Many people came up with such concepts to explain their wrong doings, and clearly here this woman wronged the man who is still in love with her and is willing to forgive her. The phrase “I still love you” means he can skip over her transgression. But she can not. For she is numb. She has judged herself guilty. She has lost the respect for the other party and for herself. This is what she is reconciling. And she can not go on even sleeping another night until she feels better about herself. She doesn’t need to have that feeling of love with him, that does not matter to her as much as her own innocence. She needs to look herself in the mirror and smile and think she is normal like before the affair. And that’s when it happens, the idea that all she did was love another. She expressed love beyond that possible in a one love universe. She felt a love greater than the opinions of those whom wish to see one man and one woman for all eternity. And now, she has a kernel of a happy solution. Whether it is a right one or not, she begins philosophizing, is debatable. She feels now, she needs to walk a bit more and explain the rest and thus can return a sleep soundly.
After a bit more walking, as that is what the song truly is, she is walking at night looking up at the moon thinking, that is essentially what all the lyrics are conveying, a woman’s thoughts during a lonely walk, she finally screams with a euphoric Eureka moment and assembles all the Lego pieces of this satisfying solution. But she can not grasp that this is a broken solution making herself even more broken as to her a happy solution allows her to return to sleep and as those whom soundly sleep and are not stressed are normal, it must be the right answer. Obviously guilty men get no rest and now she thinks she is not guilty. Lack of guilty feeling means it is the right solution and not that one is creating a greater fantasy for oneself. Here is what she figured out. Men have always oppressed women. They prevented them from voting, from working, from studying math, from even choosing their husbands. She thinks to herself like any well educated modern woman whom just recently in the historical time line of the human race received by the male patriarchy the natural right to study as an equal at school, that men were controlling whom women were loving with their hearts, even sleeping in beds with. In fact to this day in this modern world, in entire nations are legal systems that force women to marry whomever a man chooses, despite us even putting a man on the moon, but not a woman. And perhaps this is why even the moon is crying in this song. It is crying from all the sexism, from all the objectification, from all the hatred by men towards weakling little women. So this man, she now believes, was part of the oppression. He was trying to keep a good woman in his tallons by forcing her through entanglement of love and emotional wrangling to be only his and nobody else’s. It is like a father never letting his son out of the backyard for fear of him being injured while playing fudbal so the son can only ever play ball in the father’s backyard. While other children can go and join teams, and even compete in FIFA tournaments. The woman feels suddenly angry, and she thinks the man never loved her but was using love to keep another woman in the male patriarchy that wants every woman to have only one love partner and no more. And thus she concludes men punish adulteresses whom have affairs as she did and in fact there are even societies that do more than shaming them with the terms of “sluts” and “whores” such as those whom actually lobby rocks at these witch-like creatures whom would ruin very foundations of society through their explorations of sexuality thoughtlessly breaking hearts all around. In these marriage is forever cultures sleeping around is not the means to find oneself, it is not the means to have fun, and sex as sport is devastatingly seen as cruel and devil-like, in these societies what is rewarded is obedience to the men’s wishes of one woman and one man and nothing else. And finally she feels anger exploding into revenge and so the next two lines explain what she did to other men which is why she was walking that night, trying to explain to herself why she should keep going breaking hearts. She is now a freedom fighter, using sex and love to liberate others despite all saying that she is a robber of souls, a demon ruining families, a wican on the hunt for man’s misery. She sings that she feels something falling from the sky. This is mockery at God, she is singing to God and saying that his angelic men, these wonderful males whom claim to be proper and polite and loving but are actually demons oppressing women, how she is tearing them from heavens themselves by cheating on all of them purposely. Then she says what the man who broke her said to her “I’m so sad” as a mockery in other words. What, me the woman is sad? What I am so weak? You think I am so weak that loving a thousand men is a weakness and not a strength? You think me sleeping around on you with just one guy makes me pathetic? You believe your child should only play ball in your backyard and not with a thousand other people and travel the globe kicking it everywhere? You called me sad? She is ridiculing heavens, patriarchy and the original man whom loved her that much but actually now she feels his love were her handcuffs, her chain. In other words when she sings “I’m so sad” she’s about to explain the opposite, how she is strong. The way a boxer might say “I punch like a girl, but look how far your jaw fell from your head when you fell”. In other words the other guy said he punches like the girl in the last match, but now she’s gloating after every man’s heart broken whom she slept around on that she is superior, that she is strong, empowered, that she is free from “sex is a sin” and “marriage is forever” oppressive structure. And so she delivers the jaw line with “I made the angels cry”. In other words, where as she was crying and then became numb, she felt terrible about cheating on her husband, she felt like the devil herself, perhaps by his words, or her upbringing, she now thinks that making men like him cry is her purpose in life. She is now seeking good men wholesome men, men who are church going and who are born and raised to have one marriage for lie, and she is seeking to make these angelic men cry. She doesn’t feel herself a devil, she simply wishes to set them free the way she was set free. Until she lost that love and became numb she did not know how to free her sexuality. But now that she found a happy solution, one that made her think she is not guilty of anything, for after all, whom one sleeps with and where is ones own business. It is her body, it is her choice. No man gets to tell her when she sleeps with him or with another. If she can share fries with him and with others, so, too, can she share her body. The legal system can not through a marriage licence at all have anything to do with whose bed she is in or out of. Marriage licenses are not an approval of sexuality, but rather a financial and asset management document. Just the way a marriage licence never can dictate whom is at the dinner table, can it? Or what furniture the couple buys? Can a marriage licence indicate in what bed love is made and at what angle the shades are drawn? Can a marriage licence dictate the car the couple drives? But it can dictate financial assets and their allocation during a divorce, and that in fact, is all a marriage licence is for, that and saving money on taxes for the poor. The rich laugh at marriage certificates as for them it is irrelevant how much tax money anyone is paying, for the rich can even pay fines when not paying taxes and still not end up in prison. But she will not be ordered around by male’s wishes of one woman or societal ridicule and punishments. And so she says any men whom are thusly oppressed like the man whom claimed to love her but actually handcuffed her with his heart, any of those men she wishes to set free. So now she seduces even married men and cheats on them and when they break into pieces, then hopefully they will reassemble the way she figured things out, and thus if the people see each other as angels for having just one love and one marriage then she is alright with making angels cry. So she is gloating that “What? You called me sad? Look how powerful I am, I can make all your angels not only fall from the sky for me but I can also make them cry”. In other words, your thusly described as honest men of marriage are cheating on their wives how amazing I am in every aspect of life and then their hearts are being broken when they realize your beliefs were what oppressed them. The angelic men aren’t crying because I used any kind of force, I did not throw stones at the married men, the angels were not hit by me, I simply allowed them freely to love me if they so chose, and when they chose, suddenly they realized you all were oppressing them and thus the angels crying means that God was oppressing them and not the one who watched them falling from the sky, or rather from the one marriage one love belief.
The next set of words is repeated many times, “Teras from the moon, fall down like rain” meaning the moon, where only men stepped foot, is crying. It is not just a few drops but as much as a monsoon itself. The moon is crying out of joy and out of sadness, a mixed emotion. The moon’s tears mean, especially their quantity, that all these years women and men could have together stepped foot but instead the men chose for the first human steps on even the moon, our race’s first contribution and forever etched as a historical point, to have no women. Why couldn’t NASA have trained a man and a woman at the same time? If they could deliver a man they could have delivered a woman as well. But they chose not to and thus for all eternity man’s first steps into the beyond Earth zones will forever be a sign of sexism, hatred, and oppression. But at the same time the moon is crying out of joy, because the better late than never philosophy means, good things should still happen even if they were prevented at their proper moments. So the moon is happy that soon a woman will walk on it’s lovely cheesy self. Thus the next two lines are her realization that after liberating men whom still cling to one love there’s the education and science world still to be fought over and thus she sings “I reach for you (moon) I reach in vein (for being a scientist or astronaut)”. This means it’s a far, far, cry for women to want to be doctors and educators if they are only now able to choose freely whom they sleep with, whom they hug, and whom they bed. This oppression should never have been part of any race of intelligent beings unless something was grossly wrong with most of us. And perhaps much of the human race is mentally as ill as she felt broken before that walk and thus she couldn’t sleep properly but now she can. After all, if you are willing to concoct religion, beliefs, psychology, prisons, and even make popular the throwing of stones at a woman until she dies of bleeding, then obviously the entire human race was that mentally ill, that dysfunctional, that organically deficient. Why else would anyone hate a woman whose even outside shell is stunningly beautiful, whose even reflection in the water is to die for? One must have been mad when formulating these marriage is for life ideals. Sexual acts are nothing more than physical expressions of our desires for joy and happyness, just like fudbal or chess are. Just like flipping a page of a book, or like doing math homework. Sexual activities do not involve anything more magical than two people agreeing or disagreeing, meeting and parting, just like any other even tin life. We can enjoy concerts with random strangers or with our loved ones, we can enjoy everything the same way. One would say that if theatre shows may only be attended by only one other person in all your life, that this would be mad. And yet this view for sexuality is normal? This is why the moon was crying, aplenty. Because even the moon could see, let alone the sun, that something was wrong down on Earth, and so wrong that not even the smartest of the wise men could figure it out. And she is but another woman whom figured it out but not before blaming herself and feeling terrible and not before a man verbally assaulted her by calling her sad, a slang term for “slut” or “whore”, in other words, a denigrating word meant to indicate the other party is a lower form of life. As in “this worm is a sad excuse for biological cells to have coalesced into something moving, even an inorganic rock is more beautiful”. Sad is a word thusly thrown around as an insult among people who are so upper class, so angelic, that they do not even swear nor insult others and when they do, it must mean you are the devil and they dared to use a term such as “sad” outside of it’s dictionary definition, which means you truly must have crossed a line made of lava. The concluding lines say the same things about tears from the moon and then the kicker. “Can’t wash away the pain”. Meaning, for all eternity, women will cry when they read how males oppressed women, and all history will know NASA did not bother to train a woman, and not even the tears of a cheesy fellow above us can wash this stain on humanity.
Beautiful song? Ugly world? A course for a better world? Or is she just another woman who is so far broken that she does not know how to respect real love and those working hard to build a better world. Is she just another adulteress whom looked a gift horse in the mouth and went running afraid of imperfections we all have within us. Maybe she didn’t like how the man danced and thus looked for a better dancer. Maybe she loved him fully but not his nose? Maybe she cheated on him not at all out of any of these reasons but simply because she is a sociopath whom loves seeing people suffering and gave herself a nice kind cover story as I explained above? Maybe she is the devil disguising herself as liberator of angels? After all, devil’s greatest trick was tricking man into believing he was God? And either the men who want one love are the devil, or she is the devil. There’s a million ways of interpreting this song, and I have merely presented one simple analog. But this is not what most people would derive from this song and I know the normal interpretation so I worked really hard to present a unique one most would never conclude from the above lyrics. It took me a year of thinking and listening and research to come up with this explanation. The simple view of these lyrics most will think of is what makes this the duality song. The other side, the flip of the coin explanation that most will see is as follows. It is of a person who is sad, and depressed, and at night she falls apart crying and a man is there for her whenever she needs him. He would do anything, and she says she’s alright until at night when the sky gets dark, meaning when a dark cloud is above her, like in Charlie Brown, meaning bad feelings, when the world is too much, day’s events pile up and then she cries and feels sad and lonely and so forth. This is the very simple interpretation. She feels so sad even the moon is crying, she is so sad and depressed that even the angels are crying with her. Fairly straight forward, perhaps she is bipolar, or just lonely, or doesn’t know how to find the perfect love to choose from in all this world of wonderful people? Perhaps she is surrounded by choice and doesn’t know how to feel love as one partner feels nothing then she feels nothing, it’s never perfect, sometimes she loves him more and sometimes he loves her more, but so far she hasn’t found a beautiful equal love and she is getting sad and lonely as a result. Really simple interpretation and a normal one. Tears is therefore mostly about someone seeking love and unable to make up their mind or to feel like the right love is upon them. In fact, this interpretation could be that she is looking for one love for marriage, and does not wish to make the wrong choice. And thus she is very frustrated and even angry that choosing one love the angels did not make easier. In other words, the exact polar opposite of the earlier explanation. And thus this is the duality one can see in these lyrics, but the other side needs a lot of explaining for being the one breaking hearts as previously explained would involve depicting one self as a seeker of one love while trying to free people from that belief thus causing heart break. And thus the song can be seen as both interpretations presenting the duality of a person who claims and delivers one love but actually seeks to conquer the emotions and break others as they themselves feel broken. They wish this out of a need to have company in their lifestyle. After all, if I’m a smoker of cigarettes and I encourage others to smoke along with me, then I am not standing outside in winter alone, am I? The more hearts she breaks, the more people claim that her lifestyle is normal, and thus she is no longer a criminal, no longer an adulteress, and thus sleeping around becomes normal. And so the song can be seen from the third standpoint requiring the grasping of the previous two viewpoints. How does one love, anyone, if we can not know their true intentions, despite all the world’s languages? The moon itself would cry, as would the angels, from this troublesome problem. Is this perhaps what Conjure One was explaining? This conundrum? Do we fall in love if we believe in one love with just about anyone? Do we sleep around and ignore one love? What do we do? Nobody knows, even the angels are crying how complex love has become. Even the moon is crying, and not just lovers with broken hearts.
This is perhaps one of my favourite songs, and I have listened to it forever. I especially love the Hybrid Terrace mix, but many others are great. Conjure One has created a song that at some point I wish to compose a superior track when compared to. But not with lyrics. The lyrics I analyzed mostly out of fun and as a project in grasping the finer points of lyric writing. But my own music most likely will lack lyrics, as I like exploring audio mostly. Lyrics can be fun and I love many songs with good, bad, and naughty words, but at the end of the day, I am a composer and not a poet nor a lyricist. Plus for me, lyrics are an envelope, a challenge that I do not wish to conquer. I am having fun just exploring melodies and sounds and adding lyrics would be a tremendous weight upon my hobby. Songs with lyrics make a lot more money and are way more popular as anyone can verify by simply asking themselves what song without lyrics on radio or in popular media they know the name of - probably none. Almost all popular celebrities have lyrics to their most biggest hits. And as I have no designs on such accomplishments, lyrics are something I have ever only done once in a track and I liked the results, however, for now I will stick to notes and samples.
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