Black Sandy Beaches

Black Sandy Beaches
Messages from broken bottles fall on black sandy beaches
Ink in vein across the page now run from morning dew
Hands which chance upon it lead to eyes which strain to read
Hearts which pound from love long overdue
Lips which press together, stifle rhythmic, heavy breaths

Oh, how she smiles from vicarious love from the one he writes about
She must have been so glad for him to throw it out

Further steps lead to yet another broken bottle
Again, the words contained have bled the page
Whose tears were these which ran the ink?
From whom they poured to make this streak?
Were they his, by chance, from telling her?
Or hers, by chance, from reading it?
They could have been collective
They could have been from someone else
Why don’t we see what’s at the bottom?
Why don’t we see what comes next?

Oh, how she cries from vicarious pain, from the one he writes about
She must have been so sad for him to throw her out

Let’s just say she, she is better
Better off somehow
Let’s just say she, she has never been
Happier than she is now

We couldn’t fake it, so why even try?

Let’s just say she is better
Better off somehow
Let’s just say she has never been
Happier than she is now

Let’s just say she is better
Better off somehow
Let’s just say she has never been
Happier, happier, than she is now

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Ms Leading goes to address Hunter in person, but realises she is too late. Recognising that Hunter has rejected her, Ms Leading is left to mourn the happiness that could’ve been.

What’s in a name?
‘Black Sandy Beaches’… honestly, not many ideas for this one. I think it’s just to establish the imagery of a desolate beach, where messages might wash up — from there you get the image of two people on two distant islands throwing bottles back and forth, but the people have left and what remains is the bottles, since their correspondence is over. It is also literally set on a black sandy beach.

Whose viewpoint?
Ms Leading. “Isn’t this third person?” you ask. And I can’t deny that, but—

This song is maybe the most abstract in the Acts, even moreso than Where The Road Parts or Blood of the Rose. I don’t think you can take much of what’s here as literal, in the sense of the letters sent in Dear Ms. Leading having wound up in bottles on the beach for an onlooker to read. Rather, we have some hints that the ‘onlooker’ is aligning herself with Ms Leading — firstly, the onlooker is female, secondly, it’s Ms Leading’s perspective in the correspondence that she empathises with, third, the narration explicitly shifts to first person in the bridge to say the onlooker was part of the relationship, and fourth, the song concludes concerned with the happiness of Ms Leading. I think it’s feasible to read this as Ms Leading’s rather poetic and dissociated way of processing that the good times are gone and she’s been dumped, as well as a retrospective on the relationship as a whole.

So I’m going to be flagrantly breaking here my assumption of things the characters describe being literal, with the things that don’t really make sense being reflections of the emotional impact events have had on Ms Leading. You can still read it, and it still definitely works (more intuitively, even), when taken as a third person though, I’m just curious to see what happens when you filter it like this.

🌲🌲🌲

>Messages from broken bottles fall on black sandy beaches
Ms Leading, aware of the steam ships coming to take Hunter to war, runs to the beach to try and speak with him before he’s gone. But she is too late, and she sees the ships already departing the harbour. Defeated and stunned, the letters of their correspondence she has brought fall from her hands to the black sand of the beach.

‘From broken bottles’ — So the prevailing imagery we have in this song is one of two lovers, communicating over a very long distance by way of message in a bottle. This is of course reflective of the way Ms Leading and Hunter have been communicating over the end of their relationship, by letter instead of in person, but there is more happening than that. It suggests that each of the lovers is stranded, throwing out sentiments to the ocean, reflective of how empty the world is without the other.

Since the bottles are broken, though, we know the messages were received, just as we know Ms Leading and Hunter did, against odds, find each other. (The broad images of broken glass and funeral-black sand reinforce this as being a sad song, though. I mean, aside from how sad it sounds in general.)

ALSO there’s a beach (and harbour) near the city. Let’s get out that ol’ map I miss it.

>Ink in vein across the page now run from morning dew
‘Ink in vein across the page’ — The letter that she is about to read has been folded and unfolded many times, that is to say, read many times. Ms Leading often reminisces on the memories, feelings, and experiences of the relationship she is about to again relive, as it occupies a lot of her mind.

‘Run from morning dew’ — Morning dew literally places this as happening in the morning. Metaphorically, it means the dreams of the night are over (’we fall beneath the sea of dreams’), scoured out by the clarity of a stark, crisp morning. The incisive reality of their breakup has struck, smearing the memories of the past (and Ms Leading’s ability to clearly ‘read’ those memories — dissociating). Still, there’s a kind of purity in the image of dewdrops running over the letter (Ms Leading and Hunter’s relationship was scummy but still had good in it (?)), and a dissociated dreaminess in the idea of Ms Leading standing here long enough for the early morning to pass and for the dewdrops to form, and then noticing the letters she held as if she’d never seen them before.

Probably a subtle thing going on here with ‘morning’ dew as a homophone to ‘mourning’ to reinforce the feeling of bereavement that comes with the ending of a cherished relationship, alongside the black sand imagery. If you want to be really oblique you can read it as ‘mourning dew’ to mean tears but yeah that feels like stretching it.

The letter being in a condition where dew will run the ink also gives the image of it being quite old and tattered, but more in the sense of being ‘well-used’ than ‘worn out’. This was not a superficial relationship.

>Hands which chance upon it lead to eyes which strain to read / Hearts which pound from love long overdue
‘Hands which chance upon it’ — More dissociation; we aren’t given a clear view of the character that finds the letter, though she is our narrator. The way she describes finding the letter sounds only half-conscious, as if she were already sitting beside it, then after a while noticed it, and coincidentally reached out to it, ‘what’s this?’.

‘Lead to eyes which strain to read’ — The narrator has to squint to read the text. Literally, it’s because the ink is smeared from the dew. Metaphorically, taking the narrator as Ms Leading, because she’s still dissociated and has to focus for the words and scenes in her memory to even register, though she continues not to place herself as someone actually involved in these scenes, instead finding it more bearable to process these feelings from the distanced perspective of a sympathetic onlooker.

‘Hearts which pound from love long overdue’ — We’re getting the start of some dual meanings here. The ‘hearts’ ostensibly would be Ms Leading and Hunter, and while it’s true to the island imagery that they’d be isolated prior to finding each other, Hunter’s life has truthfully always been full of love. As the passion of the relationship is recounted in the letter, the ‘hearts’ that pound from these loving scenes are more precisely those of Ms Leading depicted in the letter (as she transitions away from her mercenary mindset into one of love — you can envision it as a still heart warming to beat ferociously) and… also Ms Leading, as she reads this!

After all, Ms Leading is the one whose life has had a persistent paucity of love. As she’s dissociated herself enough not to consider herself as the same person described in these letters, she experiences a vicarious fulfilment of her deepest desires, which excites and enraptures her with a deep investment to the story unfolding. The irony is that the person she’s vicariously rooting for, and wishing she could be, is herself, illustrating how her life with Hunter was fundamentally, everything she ever wanted.

>Lips which press together, stifle rhythmic, heavy breaths
Another dual meaning — we simultaneously get the image of Ms Leading and Hunter kissing and having sex, but also of the narrator Ms Leading struggling to keep herself from crying.

>Oh, how she smiles from vicarious love from the one he writes about / She must have been so glad for him to throw it out
‘Smiles from vicarious love from the one he writes about’ — Phrasing is finicky, but the narrator is smiling owing to Ms Leading’s feelings towards Hunter. It’s making the narrator happy to think about how much Ms Leading loves Hunter. Removing the filter of dissociation, it’s Ms Leading wanting to think and feel warm because of how much she loves Hunter, as she goes over those earlier parts of their relationship.

‘She must have been so glad for him to throw it out’ — Super tricky. Taken literally, it’s saying the letter the narrator is reading was written by Hunter (then how is she aware of Ms Leading’s feelings enough to be stanning her?), and was happy to find the letter on the beach — either because she’s thankful to vicariously experience this loving relationship through the letter discarded on the beach, or because the letter was cruel to Ms Leading and it comforts her to know he didn’t send it to her.

Given the narrator finds another letter that is cruel to Ms Leading, and is moved to cry for her at finding it, I’m wobbly about it being the latter, though it is kinda what feels to make the most sense. The ‘letter’, or memory or words or feelings she’s reminiscing on right now are broadly positive, but that read is pretty jarring against the aggressiveness of ‘throw it out’. Whichever way, it mostly sounds like Ms Leading trying to focus on the good times and comfort herself through the grief of losing this relationship. Like she’s convinced herself through dissociation that yeah this letter (being one of the Dear Ms. Leading correspondences, probably the first one?) is mean but Hunter did throw it out (and she knows how Ms Leading felt because she is Ms Leading and understands what Hunter’s alluding to as ‘promises of love’ or ‘make-believing everything was true’ was actually 100% genuine and thinking about how much she loves him is comforting her). Hard line in general.

>Further steps lead to yet another broken bottle / Again, the words contained have bled the page / Whose tears were these which ran the ink?
Uptick in energy here; the dissociation is fading a bit and the emotions involved are getting more intense. Ms Leading continues along the beach and spots another discarded letter, perhaps blown from its initial place, which she is again moved to inspect, albeit more proactively than the first one.

The words here are still smudged — Ms Leading is still hesitant to recollect these exchanges with clarity. This time though, it’s with tears; somebody cried on the final Dear Ms. Leading correspondence, where Hunter henceforth cut all contact with her.

>From whom they poured to make this streak? / Were they his, by chance, from telling her? / Or hers, by chance, from reading it? / They could have been collective / They could have been from someone else
More hints of dissociation; the narrator meticulously considers every single party that could have possibly been moved to tears at the tragic ending of this relationship. She already knows how this letter goes — she’s read it before, and is in denial about it. The exhaustive listing of everyone who could’ve been sad about it sounds like Ms Leading miserably stalling as the dissociation slowly eases.

Probably comforting to think that there are more people than just her who would be torn apart to know Ms Leading and Hunter’s relationship failed. The significance she’s putting on this relationship is so much you’d think they were soulmates.

>Why don’t we see what’s at the bottom? / Why don’t we see what comes next?
You can hear that edge of cynicism again here. Narrator definitely already knows what comes next, but is denying it.

>Oh, how she cries from vicarious pain, from the one he writes about / She must have been so sad for him to throw her out
Aaaand now the whammy hits. Ms Leading is forced to again consider the abject agony of knowing Hunter has left and the relationship that gave her everything she wanted from life is over, though with just enough insulation that she can consider the premise, ‘Hunter and Ms Leading will never be together again’ without totally collapsing. It feels better when she’s crying for someone else; it also feels nice to think there’s someone out there who’d be crying for her. Super lonely line.

>Let’s just say she, she is better / Better off somehow / Let’s just say she, she has never been / Happier than she is now
Still using the framing of being an onlooker, but not really dissociated anymore, Ms Leading authors for herself a slapdash attempt at consolation — something, anything that she could say to help her move on. The track she takes is somewhere between ‘don’t cry because it’s gone, smile because it happened’ and ‘but then she lived happily ever after!’.

It’s nonsense and she knows it; she’s not even really pretending to convince herself. Though it’s true that meeting Hunter has been a fundamentally positive experience for her life, and rekindled her faith in love as a concept, to have briefly acquired exactly what she wanted, and seen hope of escaping the city’s corruption, only to lose it so utterly, probably feels even more torturous than if she never met Hunter at all. But what she experienced with him is too great for her to wish or pretend it never happened, either.

Being practical through her agony, she declines to wallow in pity about it. She can’t get him back. The relationship is over. That’s how it is, so screw it. Mourn the whole thing, pretend it’s fine, and go forward.

Really strong verse.

>We couldn’t fake it, so why even try?
The dissociation completely drops; Ms Leading reveals herself as the narrator. With a sharp bout of cynicism, she concedes the relationship was always doomed and that there’s no point in holding onto it.

>Final Chorus Repetition
Might be a switch to Hunter, sounds like his intonation but could also be just a side effect of Casey getting intense lol. Definitely get the image of him telling himself that Ms Leading is somehow in better straits now than she’s ever been, to clear his conscience of the guilt of abandoning her and shove any worries about her out of his mind, on the conceit that she’ll be fine. Almost as if he’s able to ‘hear’ her telling the world not to worry about her and is picking up the wavelength.

Get a really strong image of Hunter with his bags all packed as he gets on the ship here, too, for some reason.

‘Never been happier than she is now’ — Reprising ‘until we resurface again’ melody from Bitter Suite III. Ms Leading and Hunter’s paths separate from each other, breaking them apart again into two individuals.

>3:42 – 3:57 Oracles on the Delphi Express into The Church & The Dime Transition Reprise
Solidifying the switch from Ms Leading to Hunter’s viewpoint, maybe? We last heard this little tune when Hunter was wandering around the City for the first time, discovering it after getting off the train.

Not sure what it’s representing here specifically though. Maybe just the exploration of a new environment, or a big camera shift, or mirroring Hunter and Ms Leading parting ways with the same melody on which they first encountered each other (Ms Leading leaving the beach?/zooming out of the beach scene to open ocean?).

>3:58 – 4:13 Instrumental
Scene illustration: we’re on the docks, with harbour bells ringing, seagulls squawking, and the waves whispering. Hunter’s ship has departed.

Dear Ms. Leading | Act II | Vital Vessels Vindicate