Melpomene

Melpomene
Cold had I calloused
Walls were raised to bear the weight I’d not take
Too slow were my senses
Muted musings lost their way; disconnected
Only silence remained, holding my breath in the dark
Gasping for air with the lungs of a lark

So warm was your welcome; humble in its embrace
Tell me, just how did you save me;
Pull me up from the grave?
Though my youth did mislead, I would retreat to you
Right back to your arms with my spirit aglow
Where the pains of the past exit en masse; through you
Too lost when we part, with the lungs of a lark

I, far removed from myself, had denied what I lost when my heart had withdrawn to the fray
In a whimsical way, I would flee from the truth
I could bury in youth
You would have me, if I’d fallen again
Would you bring me back out of the dark, with my lungs of a lark?

Cold have I calloused, but these walls are coming down

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Troubled by the reopening of the Dime, Hunter goes to see Ms Leading. They are back in a relationship again, and Hunter feels able to be himself and feel happy again around her, giving him a refuge of warmth and love in what is otherwise a very dark situation. His confidence in himself is slowly rebuilding from this point of stability.

What’s in a name?
‘Melpomene’ — This is the name of the greek muse of tragedy. With this being a song about Ms Leading, it points to Ms Leading as Hunter’s ‘muse’, ‘inspiration,’ ‘power source’, during the midst of the horrible and tragic situation he has found himself in. It is probably also foreshadowing that Ms Leading’s fate itself will also be tragic.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:20 Instrumental
Wow! After all the grunge, bleakness, and darkness of every song up until now, the gentle happiness of this song is startling. With Hunter’s life being so terrible at present, and him having just faced the agony of being responsible for the revival of The Dime, how is he possibly in any kind of state of mind that could be called ‘happy’? Or ‘peaceful’, even ‘pleasant’?

The answer is that he’s with Ms Leading. Hunter has gone to see her, and is able to feel comfort and warmth again in her presence, as he has finally put aside the fears and misgivings he expressed in Waves and Wait. He will express over this song the reality of their mutual love, which is stabilising to Hunter.

>Cold had I calloused / Walls were raised to bear the weight I’d not take
‘A cold calloused heart, sitting still in this cave of a chest’. So this song begins with Hunter acknowledging the mistakes he has made in previously rejecting this relationship, rather, not so much the relationship specifically (in the sense of the ego-damage Red Hands mishap, since he had already moved past that by the end of Cauda), but the very concept of love as he knows it being a real thing he should dare to want or pursue. So the sentiment he is addressing is moreso the one we see in This Beautiful Life, Life and Death, Waves, Is There Anybody Here?, etc, where he concedes that he does feel strong affection for Ms Leading, but is terrified of pursuing it at risk of losing his coping mechanism for the pain of This Beautiful Life.

Hunter faced a lot of traumatic experiences over the war, but the one that truly broke him was the revelation of Ms Terri’s life as a prostitute, expressed in This Beautiful Life. Ever since then, Hunter has been frantically suppressing the pain of This Beautiful Life, that being the impetus for him adopting the Son persona, so he could remake himself as a better person (the type who doesn’t idiotically spite their mother’s sincere attempts to protect them and profane her memory) and dissociate from this inherent pain of ‘being Hunter’. The immediate consequence of this is that he numbed himself to his own heart (’One of these days, he will learn to love again’ — his original plan in Cauda/WIMTBA was to return to Ms Leading, he dismissed this idea by the end of the war to instead escape the pain of his own life), then turned away from love (Waves), then fled his love of Ms Leading again to invest instead in the Son persona (A Night On The Town/Is There Anybody Here?).

Love has always been Hunter’s greatest desire, his central value, and the thing he feels he betrayed in both his mishap with Ms Leading and by pursuing the truth of Ms Terri. It’s his core. So of course his struggle to reinvent himself as someone else through Act IV means, fundamentally, trying to escape his own desires and reverence for love — and of course he ultimately failed, hooking up with Ms Leading again (Wait).

Anyway the point of this line is basically to express all of ^ this ^ — Hunter is finally examining his actions and feelings towards Ms Leading from a more sincere perspective. Every time he has rejected her or kept his distance from her has been to try and avoid that deep, traumatic pain of: losing his mom, betraying his mom, losing his agency and then being powerless to save his mom, finding out how his dad treated his mom, etc etc and so on. Basically it’s that same basic issue as in Act II where he’s scared of submitting to love because it could backfire and hurt him like what happened with his mom, with the Act III/IV elements included of Hunter being doubly scared because any tie to his own identity is intrinsically painful and could destroy the new, ‘better’ self he’s built.

By this point though, Hunter’s kind of beyond all of that. His ‘better’ self is completely hollow and subverted, and the situation all that running from pain has got him into is worse than just being ‘painful’, it’s evil in a way he fundamentally can’t accept and can barely even live with. So yes he returns to Ms Leading, and to his own desires and reverence for love, if only to escape the confusion and darkness that is everything else… and finds that actually, embracing his feelings of and desire for love and Ms Leading is not such a scary thing anymore.

>Too slow were my senses / Muted musings lost their way; disconnected
Hunter expressing that he took too long to realise that the right move was to surrender to love again and return to Ms Leading, as he had naturally figured to do in Cauda, rather than pursue the Son persona.

The ‘disconnect’ is probably pointing to Hunter’s disconnect from his own heart to be fleeing from love in the way he did by adopting the Son persona; doing so was meant to relieve his pain, and he had all these great rational reasons why the son persona would make him stronger and less hurt (The Old Haunt), but this whole premise was stupid because love is what matters to him and makes him feel safe anyway. Being true to love and finding strength and comfort in it is always what he should have done. (Probably why he’s going to Ms Leading right now too — he’s hurt after the Dime’s revival and wants to feel comfort).

Man, you can hear the triumph on ‘lost their way’ — Hunter feels happy to know for certain where he went wrong, now that he’s in this clearheaded mindset where he’s able to see what happened (and consequently, see what he actually wants to pursue). Wonder if he’s literally saying all this to Ms Leading and feels great just getting these things clear, reconciling, and getting these pains off his chest?

>Only silence remained, holding my breath in the dark
Probably more pointing to mid-late Act IV and early Act V stuff — Is There Anybody Here? into as/after Hunter crossed the point of no return and realised TP&P had subverted his Son persona. You can see this like the world around ‘real’ Hunter disappearing into the darkness, his real self keeping quiet (suppressed) as Hunter plays the role of ‘Son’ Hunter, until his connection to that persona collapses and Hunter begins to lose all landmarks of who he is and where to go (culminating in deep confusion as in Cascade).

>Gasping for air with the lungs of a lark
‘And how long can I breathe this stolen breath here underneath?’. Not long enough, apparently. Hunter has long crossed the threshold where this Son persona is comfortable, functional, or tenable for him — he instead feels so suffocated by it that he’s barely alive while living it. And more than that, since he can’t escape the persona either, he is just always feeling like he cannot express his true self and instead is constantly doing things contrary to himself that keep killing and strangling the real him.

Remember that a large part of the appeal of the Son persona for Hunter was the concept that the agency of not being sheltered would allow him to rebuild himself as a fundamentally stronger and better person — he thought he could become his ideal self by disassociating from his actual self, who he regarded as bad, but also saw the ‘ideal’ self as truer to his ‘actual’ self anyway, ie, that it would allow him to more freely express his true self (The Old Haunt, The Line). He is now heavily taking back that sentiment and saying the only good things his idealised self had were things his actual self also had anyway, or else he wouldn’t feel so awful trying to conform to it now that it’s corrupted.

There’s a lot in the line “Lungs of a lark”. Larks are fragile, and since the line is sung by Hunter, he is also representing himself as a very fragile person trying to express himself. Also, a Lark can imitate other birds, and the Boy is mimicking another person too.

>So warm was your welcome; humble in its embrace
‘With words beyond me, she welcomed me in’, hearkening to Bitter Suite III: Embrace. Points to Hunter both renewing the sentiments he felt back then and devoting himself to them again, and to how Ms Leading received Hunter after he got back with her in Wait: she was extremely kind, accepting, and loving to him. She has moved past any bitter blood from their breakup and is just happy to have and be with him again. (We heard shades of this already in A Night On The Town: ‘where’s your heart?’).

Hunter feels welcome and embraced in her company: he feels loved and is loving in turn. Probably also a euphemistic confirmation that they’re having sex again, too.

>Tell me, just how did you save me; / Pull me up from the grave?
Ms Leading has helped Hunter reconnect to his real self and given him a place where he can be that real self freely. He doesn’t need to put on any guises, pretentions, or lies around her: he can just be his honest unfiltered self with her, and she’ll still love and support him. This is an immense solace for Hunter and he is deeply grateful for it; he feels like she has saved his life and his self.

>Though my youth did mislead, I would retreat to you / Right back to your arms with my spirit aglow / Where the pains of the past exit en masse; through you
Hunter admitting that he messed up in Act II but that he still loves and finds comfort, strength, and thrives again around Ms Leading. All of the pain and trauma he’s been running from melts away in her presence as well. She’s like his sanctuary now, from all the darkness and confusion of the world that surrounds him. More than just a sanctuary too, she makes him feel empowered and alive.

‘Though my youth did mislead’ -> ‘Mislead’ acting as our keyword to know this song is talking about Ms Leading, if we didn’t have confirmation of that.

>Too lost when we part, with the lungs of a lark
All the strength, warmth, brightness, certainty, connection to himself, stability, and comfort Hunter feels when he’s with Ms Leading disappears the instant Hunter leaves her and has to put on his Son persona again. We can imagine the double life he’s living, where everything including his life at home with his Wife is suffocating and fake, with Ms Leading being the one bright point or refuge where he can shed all those lies and freely, happily just be his honest self — in the company of his true lover.

I suppose I’ll take this as the point to ask: is Ms Leading still a prostitute? And I would say no. We already saw her working as a bartender in Act IV, so we know she’s able to get by without necessarily resorting to sex work, and heard her over Act II progressively lean away from prostitution as a lifestyle as well. Plus, with Hunter being the Mayor, the option is open to rely on his wallet for her necessities before she would have to resort to hooking. So even with The Dime reopen, and some time having passed since we saw her as a bartender, she probably is not a prostitute anymore, or at least isn’t one who works in any organised fashion under a pimp like in The Dime. (Plus Hunter just left The Dime to see Ms Leading — probably wouldn’t work if she was present there).

>I, far removed from myself, had denied what I lost when my heart had withdrawn to the fray / In a whimsical way, I would flee from the truth / I could bury in youth
Basically going over the ideas expressed in the beginning again. While trying to distance himself from himself, Hunter convinced himself he had not experienced love with Ms Leading, because he was still hurt and reeling from This Beautiful Life/his experiences in the war and did not want to risk exposing himself to it again. He tried to dismiss everything he knew to be true about himself, his strengths, his weaknesses, and his desires as examples of immaturity (which was, in itself, pretty silly). Hunter hardcore rescinding everything he said in Waves and embracing himself as loving Ms Leading.

>You would have me, if I’d fallen again / Would you bring me back out of the dark, with my lungs of a lark?
Hunter relies on Ms Leading to pick him up and bring him back to the right path when he’s going astray, leaning on her as his support and the refuge for his soul. Ms Leading, being in love with him too, of course is willing to provide this and ensure Hunter isn’t destroying himself, protecting his heart as well as she can. Hunter accepting the reality that Ms Leading seriously just loves him and has always had his interests in mind.

Echoes of ‘Was I just a playful pawn, a trophy you had won / Someone who could lift you when you’re low?’ though I don’t think it’s saying that Hunter is making emotional demands that Ms Leading feels aren’t reciprocated, so much as Hunter just needing this kind of support and that mirroring the Son’s needs as well, but with Hunter actually being loving in response also.

Wonder how many of his troubles and anxieties Hunter has divulged to Ms Leading? Can’t say, but he definitely trusts her to be able to guide him, and give him something true and positive to want to live for.

Also echoes the ‘everything you thought you had…’ motif, but in the sense of feeling accepted and supported in the way that he didn’t in WIMTBA when he realised he’d thrown away everything.

>Cold have I calloused, but these walls are coming down
YAAAAAAAAAAY HUNTER!!!! YEESSS!!

‘One of these days, he will learn to love again’ FINALLY this prediction is fulfilled! Through his renewed relationship with Ms Leading, Hunter can reconnect with his real desires and is letting himself embrace love again as his central value, and more importantly, embrace giving, receiving, and living for love. He’s finally letting himself be honest, vulnerable, and from that, loving and happy even in the darkness of his present life. Hunter is getting his footing back to start resisting this bleak situation and embrace more of what he actually wants.

‘I love you’ in as many words. Really sweet and happy song. With this line being spoken so softly, gives me the impression Hunter has exited Ms Leading’s place and is speaking to himself in this comment, (maybe considering involving her to help him fight TP&P? If he hasn’t already basically done that by divulging his troubles over this song), realising that he’s positively changing before looking up at the streets and the City again.

>3:40 – 4:02 Ambiance
Okay so we have footsteps… then cars… then the opening of a door and people laughing as if in some speakeasy. If the ‘walls are coming down’ isn’t like a fade to black and transition into the reveal of Mr Usher, this might be Hunter walking away from Ms Leading’s place, then getting a ride to some kind of sleazy socialite party where he has to put on the Son persona again. Probably is just a transition into Mr Usher though.

The Revival | Act V | Mr. Usher (On His Way To Town)