Blood of the Rose

Blood of the Rose
Dance, dance your decay
All the while unknowing that you’re led astray
Sleep, sleep through your woe
While your voice slowly withers and melts away

Sing, sing unto me
The pleasure and the pain
Reveal to me
The reasons my love’s not in vain

Sangre, sangre de la rosa
Sigue en paz sin el pasado
Recé, recé por su alma
Ella morirá en el battesimo del fuego

Sing, sing unto me
The pleasure and the pain
Reveal to me
The reasons my love’s not in vain

The world burns, but still we breathe
The iron chambered heart a sieve
That sifts through honest elegance
And suffers from the wrong defense
The world burns, but still we breathe
The iron chambered heart a sieve
That sifts through honest elegance
And suffers from the wrong defense

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Hunter and Ms Leading’s relationship continues. Hunter comes upon Ms Leading with a client, and learns she is a prostitute.

What’s in a name?
‘Blood of the Rose’ — evocative but hard to grasp, isn’t it? The song as a whole is like that, where you can kinda feel the vibe but don’t have many landmarks to cling to. Our hint from Q&A sessions is ‘Blood of the Rose is about Act V.’; I don’t think that’s true in whole, though, which makes this song extremely hard to read.

Anyway, blood of the rose would be the blood left upon a rose when you touch its thorns. In the context of Hunter and Ms Leading, it represents something going wrong and someone getting pricked. Specifically, this would be Hunter discovering that Ms Leading is a prostitute.

Could have a double meaning in ‘the rose’ being Ms Leading, and ‘the blood of the rose’ foreshadowing her death.

Whose viewpoint?
Hhhhhunter? It’s vague but it’s either him or an omniscient narrator. Maybe him as an omniscient narrator.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:18 Instrumental
So right off this sounds like a tango, a tense and tragic song of more than just love, but romance. Things are not all well between Hunter and Ms Leading, and the friction will soon reveal itself…

>Dance, dance your decay / All the while unknowing that you’re led astray
This line grounds us to Hunter — he was the one who was dancing when we last left him off, and he’s the one being misled in this relationship. Gives me the image of us looking down on Hunter smiling and retrieving Ms Leading from a session with a client, and though she smiles back and he remains oblivious to the truth of the situation, we know exactly what’s going on.

‘Love decays while call girls perform’. I can read this like, Hunter is losing his agency because he’s being fooled by Ms Leading (who obviously isn’t telling him anything about what’s going on), so he doesn’t have the ability to make informed decisions, but it’s probably more like… he’s falling deeper and deeper for Ms Leading and devoting himself more and more to her, so when the revelation comes that she’s not who he thought, it’s going to sting him much worse than it would have otherwise and lead him to react much more rashly, thoughtlessly, and impulsively than if this were somebody he weren’t serious about.

>Sleep, sleep through your woe / While your voice slowly withers and melts away
Hunter is numbing himself to his grief over Ms Terri by pursuing this relationship. Simultaneously, because he’s using this chance to run from his grief instead of address it, he’s straying from his search to find answers to his history and letting himself be lost in that regard. The individual things that make Hunter Hunter are becoming subordinate to him being Ms Leading’s boyfriend, with no particular baggage.

Double entendre with sleep, since he’s literally sleeping with Ms Leading, still.

I can also read this line as referencing Ms Leading, but the song generally feels more readable when taking the subject as Hunter, so that’s how I’ll go.

>Sing, sing unto me / The pleasure and the pain / Reveal to me / The reasons my love’s not in vain
‘Sing’ has so far been used as a shorthand, or command, for the progression of the story. This sounds like Hunter, as a semi-omniscient narrator who has realised he’s being misled, asking for the story to continue so that he can understand why he had this relationship with Ms Leading. It wasn’t all a pointless nothing, was it? The purpose wasn’t simply for him to be fooled, hurt, and betrayed, was it?

>Sangre, sangre de la rosa / Sigue en paz sin el pasado / Recé, recé por su alma / Ella morirá en el battesimo del fuego
(Blood, blood of the rose / Follow in peace without the past / Pray, pray for her soul / She will die in a baptism of fire)*

So the purpose of the relationship is revealed to Hunter: he’s to be hurt by this romance so that he can move to discard his whole self, setting into motion act IV. But following that, in act V, Ms Leading will be martyred and die in the fire that Hunter was destined to start — the burning of the Dime. The reason for this relationship is so that Hunter’s fate can be fulfilled and the Dime can be burned.

Ms Leading technically doesn’t die in the fire, though, but that’s splitting some hairs.

Mentally, I think the name for the event of the Dime’s burning is the ‘Baptism of Fire’.

*I don’t speak Spanish, so I don’t trust how I read this, but gave it a shot. Translation yoinked from Genius.

>Chorus Repetition – 2:16 Instrumental
In this repetition, the process of the ‘pleasure and the pain’ is revealed; IE, the moment that Hunter realises Ms Leading is a prostitute occurs.

Ms Leading forgets her scarf in Hunter’s carraige while visiting today’s client, so Hunter helpfully follows her to return it. He is shocked to find her in the midst of sex with another man. The client kicks Hunter out, Ms Leading hastily finishes up, and upon her return, Hunter, struggling to process what he’s seen, asks her to explain herself with the desperate hope that she wasn’t just wilfully cheating on him.

>The world burns, but still we breathe / The iron chambered heart a sieve / That sifts through honest elegance / And suffers from the wrong defense
First iteration of this verse feels broad, more connected to the overarching narrative than this one scene, and in that sense more focused on Hunter. I’m not sure how to read it though, so moving on to the second iteration, where we hear Hunter coming in and growing more angry as he puts the situation together.

With the discovery of Ms Leading’s infidelity, Hunter’s life feels like it has ended. Obviously it hasn’t actually, they’re both still fine, but after investing so much into this relationship, Hunter cannot feel anything but pain, betrayal, anger, and the loss of the happy peaceful future he could’ve had with Ms Leading.

Since both he and Ms Leading can be kind of closed-off, I’m not sure who the iron chambered heart is, but I think it’s Ms Leading… in which case Hunter is saying that Ms Leading has simultaneously been emotionally closed (she told him nothing) and way too romantically loose (she’s slept with tons of men).

‘That sifts though honest elegance’ -> Despite this discovery that Ms Leading is a prostitute, the fact that she’s beautiful and charming is genuine… which in itself is what facilitated her work as a prostitute. If she didn’t have those qualities, she wouldn’t have been all that successful. Really abstract line though, unsure.

‘And suffers from the wrong defense’ -> Ms Leading finally comes clean about her occupation, defending herself by informing that she was only sleeping with this man because it’s her job, and it’s not personal. But, unlike what Ms Leading may have hoped in Evicted, Hunter does not take this news well…

>3:30 – 3:49 Instrumental
I like imagining this as them leaving the client’s house and Hunter flatly inviting Ms Leading into the carriage, for what proceeds to be a really quiet, really awkward drive home where Hunter is struggling to find the right angle to approach the upcoming conversation.

Evicted | Act II | Red Hands