Dear Ms. Leading

Dear Ms. Leading
Dear Ms. Leading, I hate to tell you that I no longer need your services
The bitter fabricating manufacturer of lust you have been presented as
Doesn’t do a thing for me, I now know your identity
A black widow who tempts her prey with promises of love
If ignorance is bliss, wish I were blissfully ignorant, but I’m not
I’m enlightened now, light has been presented to me
In spite of you

Come now, Ms. Leading, I regret to inform you
I’ve fallen out of lust
It must be so hard to understand
(Oh no, I don’t think so, oh no, I don’t think so)
Did you really think me a fool enough to play along?
Make-believing everything you said was true
Push your pouting lips on other unsuspecting lovers
(Oh no, I don’t think so, oh no, I don’t think so)

Dear Ms. Leading, in response to your response, I’m simply unavailable
I hope you got the message in the message that I sent
(Shame on me for falling for someone so dense)
In different times, I might’ve fooled around for something warm
Something with security
As fleeting as the momentary rapture and the pleasure of
Collapsing in arms so welcoming to others just like me

(Go take another life
Go take another life
Go take another life)

Come now, Ms. Leading, I regret to inform you
I’ve fallen out of lust
It must be so hard to understand
(Oh no, I don’t think so, oh no, I don’t think so)
Did you really think me a fool enough to play along?
And make-believing everything you said was true
Push your pouting lips on other unsuspecting lovers
(Oh no, I don’t think so, oh no, I don’t think so)

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Rather than meet with Ms Leading, Hunter drunkenly writes her an angry letter to cement their break-up. Severing her from his life, he decides to pursue something totally different for his future, and instead looks to joining the military.

What’s in a name?
Dear Ms. Leading. That’s to indicate Hunter’s writing a letter to her, of course, but also parallels with the band’s name overall: ‘The Dear Hunter’.

Going on a tangent for a moment, the Dear Ms. Leading demos are also named for this song (or at least go out of the way to highlight it by sharing its name), it being the ‘lesson’ of the story in those demos. There, it presents a double meaning. The first half of the demo presents Ms Leading as a figure Hunter loves, something endearing — Dear Ms Leading — but the song where the relationship culminates and where that title appears is this one, where he ferociously disavows Ms Leading as a manipulative whore. So the demo title gains the second meaning, essentially, of ‘getting burned by a whore’.

That duality is lost in the Acts, but you can still see the contrast between the title of this song and the overall title of the band as The Dear Hunter. ‘My dear Hunter’ is what Ms Terri called Hunter as a term of affection; now those words have been twisted into one of distance and detachment by Hunter’s confrontation of Ms Leading via letter. This is also where Hunter begins truly straying from the principles Ms Terri taught him — he’s made mistakes in Red Hands, and made the mistake of leaving the Lake at all, but now he’s actively choosing to reject the peaceable option and his own feelings of love.

Another aside, I think you can read ‘The Dear Hunter’ in a literal way and have it fit, that is to say, ‘person who ‘hunts’ ‘dear’’, or in less abstract words ‘someone looking for affection’. (’Traveled all this way just to find love’). While also designating him as someone beloved (by Ms Terri) (and from that love is able to destroy evil). Not sure how much stock I put in that last read I just think it’s neat.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:22 Instrumental
Hunter is in a bar, faced still with the problem of how to respond to Ms Leading’s offer. Unable to come to any solution while sober, he drinks, and as he drinks, his energy becomes more determined and angry. Finally able to make a decision, Hunter takes a pen and begins furiously writing a letter…

The lyrics in this song overall are pretty straightforward, so there’s not too much to comment, aside from a general statement on Hunter’s mental state. He’s trying to deny that he had any investment or affection for Ms Leading, or rather that if he did have any affection, it was for a lie that didn’t exist and so Ms Leading should piss off with her attempts to manipulate him back in. He is very anxious about being manipulated, hurt, and losing control over his life again.

Given that he’s insecure, he is also looking to put himself in a superior position and comfort himself by brutally insulting her, drawing on the same basic destructive/vengeful/fiery energy we saw in Red Hands. It’s far more aggressive and targeted here, as he takes her as a far more actively malevolent figure. By totally dismissing any chance of a future with Ms Leading in this manner, and burning the bridge as thoroughly as he can, he’s able to avoid addressing his pain and commit himself to escaping to a new life entirely, though this aspect is maybe not conscious.

>Dear Ms. Leading, I hate to tell you that I no longer need your services / The bitter fabricating manufacturer of lust you have been presented as / Doesn’t do a thing for me, I now know your identity
Alright, so starting off, Hunter denies wholesale that he ever had a serious investment in Ms Leading. Moreover, he doesn’t care to stay with her anymore, as he has higher standards for himself than cynical, mercenary prostitutes looking to control him with pussy.

>A black widow who tempts her prey with promises of love
Hunter zeroes in on ‘love’ as the thing that enables Ms Leading to control him, indirectly confessing that he did have affection for her and was desperate to see it returned. It also cements, again, that the aspect of her prostitution that upsets Hunter so much is the fundamental idea that she doesn’t care about him, or that she would put his devoted feelings for her on an equivalent or inferior level to the cash and sex she gets from her clients.

His solution to Where The Road Parts, also, is cemented here as an attempt by Ms Leading to reel him back in so she can continue misusing him. I’ll also note his rhetoric for why he’s justified to insult her has changed slightly since Red Hands. Before, he was mad she loved other people — now, he’s accusing that she doesn’t even love the men she cheated on him with, but that she was just maliciously manipulating them for money, which is both somehow closer to the truth and even more totally wrong.

>If ignorance is bliss, wish I were blissfully ignorant, but I’m not / I’m enlightened now, light has been presented to me / In spite of you
Hunter now claims that this experience has painfully shed him of his naive innocence, hence she cannot take advantage of him anymore. The reality is that he’s still very naive, and will only begin to truly lose this naivety in Act III.

Once again, he is also blaming her explicitly for his pain and misfortunes, with the implication that she owes him some kind of atonement.

>Did you really think me a fool enough to play along? / Make-believing everything you said was true / Push your pouting lips on other unsuspecting lovers
Hunter rejects the idea that Ms Leading ever loved him, and insists any claims otherwise were just manipulations, using the fact she never told her of her prostitution as evidence of her untoward motives. Though the fact Ms Leading is a prostitute would be obvious to literally anyone except Hunter, embracing the perspective that she routinely tricks people away from learning so lets him save his ego, and retroactively lessens the sting of his failure in Red Hands.

Note the uptick of anger on ‘fool’ and ‘true’: Hunter feels like an idiot for not figuring things out earlier, and is terrified of confronting the idea that Ms Leading really wasn’t lying about her feelings for him. The drawn-out forlorn tone on ‘lovers’ also suggests than even though Hunter’s saying all this, he is seriously uncomfortable imagining her with someone else after he’s gone.

>1:50 – 1:57 The Procession Drums
Having finished and sent off his letter(s?), Hunter is left with a bit of a conundrum of what to do next. However, he chances upon an ‘out’ — an advertisement for young men like him to join the military, represented by these drums first heard at the end of The Procession (signifying the frustrated resolution to leave his current situation, and preparation to do so). He files an application to join the army.

>Dear Ms. Leading, in response to your response, I’m simply unavailable / I hope you got the message in the message that I sent
Ms Leading has received Hunter’s letter (letters?) and replied to him. However, Hunter doesn’t even read her latest reply, having made up his mind to instead stake himself on the army without problems from his current life affecting him. This doesn’t mean he’ll neglect to get the last word, though, and he writes to assert he will have no further contact with her from this point.

There’s an uptick of energy in this verse, being a little less impotently angry than the ones before it — Hunter has a direction to pursue, now.

>In different times, I might’ve fooled around for something warm / Something with security
Man, he’s really talking like one breakup makes him some wizened old man. I think the fact he does have a new direction without Ms Leading now allows him to confess these genuine vulnerabilities of his, though he dresses them up as if they’re not a big deal/he’s moved past them. But he is fundamentally admitting he glommed onto Ms Leading because she offered him the warmth and stability he desperately needed after the death of Ms Terri.

>As fleeting as the momentary rapture
Again he is indirectly confessing that he’s still looking for comfort and security, but that his experience with Ms Leading has burned him too severely for him to trust her as his pillar again. He wants something safe and permanent.

>and the pleasure of / Collapsing in arms so welcoming to others just like me
‘I fell into her arms’ / ‘she welcomed me in’ — line as a whole is pretty self explanatory, just wanted to bring attention to these callbacks. Hunter’s thinking back on his first encounter with her in Embrace and has grimly realised Ms Leading invited tens or hundreds of people to coitus in the exact same room in the exact same manner, undermining the very reason he fell in love with her, apart from making a general statement on the cheapness of the comforts she offered (and offers to nobodies).

>Go take another life
Interesting contrast with ‘sacrifice another life’ — that was him and Ms Leading resigning to forfeit their possible happy life together, now this is Hunter determining to choose something new. I envision this as Hunter going through the processes to get officially instated in the military, going through the tests, having his application accepted, getting sorted into his regiment, the date of his shipment being secured…

It’s a very turbulent sequence though, isn’t it? Of course, with his new life being one in war as a soldier, there’s inherently going to be a lack of peace, but I think there’s a little more than that. First of all, Hunter isn’t really enthused to be joining the military, and doesn’t even have any particular purpose he wants to achieve there as he did in leaving the Lake, so much as he just wants to get as far away from this life as possible and slam the reset button. He doesn’t sound to particularly have doubts about what he’s doing, but it’s inherently a negative kind of decision where he’s not really showing agency (which is what he’s looking for, control and comfort) so much as throwing himself at whatever new thing he can and being swept up in that course.

Next there’s a double meaning in ‘take another life’ — Hunter is metaphorically killing himself (’I’m a killer / But I was killing myself all along’) by choosing to run from Ms Leading, (remember the Oracles advised that Hunter and Ms Leading staying together was the key to their salvation), and the turbulence of this sequence illustrates the grim destruction of the naive Hunter who came to the city. Not that Hunter isn’t still naive, but his readiness to discard himself for comfier pastures (yes Hunter legitimately thinks running to a war front will be less agonising than staying on the same continent as his ex) is already pretty concerning. This guy’s discomfort tolerance is low. Like, low-low-low-low Low.

There is also the literal element, in that, as a soldier, Hunter will be killing people. Hunter does not realise how terrible of a decision this is yet.

>3:09 – 3:44 Instrumental
Chilled out a bit. Not sure that this signifies anything particularly, but I can read this as him coming up to the day of his deployment, not nervous about it or anything, but knowing he’s going forward now, and soon will not have to think about Ms Leading.

Might be in Oracles, also?

>Final verse repetition
Hunter cements his ultimate rejection of Ms Leading, resolved to try something new.

Where The Road Parts | Act II | Black Sandy Beaches