Rebirth

Rebirth
A sinister slide resounds
From the fountainhead found
When fortune aligned

The roots that ripped had run too deep
Left to dig in the weeds
And climb up the vine

Your mind is only echoing
What your heart wouldn’t say:
“I’ll be me, in time”

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
The Oracles again advise Hunter to his missteps. They note that Hunter can’t escape his past by assuming the guise of the Son, nor does he truly want to, but again, Hunter doesn’t listen.

What’s in a name?
In assuming the identity of the Son, Hunter has killed himself so as to be ‘reborn’ as the Son. The album will follow his attempts to distance himself from his old identity and establish himself on a new course with this new identity.

I think there’s also a somewhat meta shade to this, as there was a 6-year gap between Act III and Act IV and stylistically it shows. Both musically and lyrically, songs here are much more intricate than in the first three acts, and though probably unintentional, it works astoundingly well to convey how Hunter himself has matured between Act III and Act IV aside from Casey maturing as a musician.

Whose viewpoint?
Oracles.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:10 AaaaAAAAaaaAAaaaaa
AaAAAAAAAaaAAAAaaaAAA yes hello Oracles. Once again, they are here to establish the themes of this chapter and tell Hunter where he’s going wrong.

>A sinister slide resounds / From the fountainhead found / When fortune aligned
woah woah woah these LYRICS! Yeah, in that six year gap, Casey got a lot stronger when it comes to conveying ideas through lyrical imagery — which makes understanding them significantly harder unless you really sit down to think about them. Even then I don’t think anyone would have figured out what certain songs meant had Casey not explained what they were. They’re beautiful but man does this make reading them, especially the ones in Act IV, hard.

‘A sinister slide resounds’ -> taking ‘slide’ to mean a change of note on a violin, this is pointing to how Hunter has discarded his old identity for that of the Son’s. Metaphorically, the ‘note’ he is has changed, this being a sinister change both because it will bring Hunter to ruin and because he committed murder to achieve it, compromising his own morals and doing away with his principles of love.

‘From the fountainhead found when fortune aligned’ -> ‘fountainhead’ being the Son, who Hunter encountered and recognised to be his brother (from the General’s story) by total chance in the War. Hunter will be reliant on things downstream of the Son to guide him in this new life (ie, who the Son was close with, where he lived, what kind of person he was).

>The roots that ripped had run too deep / Left to dig in the weeds / And climb up the vine
‘The roots that ripped’ -> Hunter’s past, which he has tried to disassociate himself from.

‘Had run too deep’ -> Hunter is not able to actually disassociate himself from his past, however, as it runs too deep. The roots have survived and the plant will regrow. Also saying that the pain Hunter has suffered is too much for him to totally ignore it — rather, he’s only taking the actions he is because the pain was so much, which is an extremely Hunter thing to do.

‘Left to dig in the weeds / and climb up the vine’ -> Though Hunter has turned away from his past, it’s still there and will continue to have implications and effects on his life while he occupies himself with ignoring it. The past is tenacious as a weed and its implications span as high as a vine.

>Your mind is only echoing / What your heart wouldn’t say: / “I’ll be me, in time”
The real whammy, contesting Hunter’s core motives for having stolen the Son’s identity. Hunter has devised this plan because he thinks he can be a better person as the Son than as Hunter, and Hunter likes to consider the ‘real’ him as a basically good person. Consider, ever since he was a child sheltered by Ms Terri, Hunter has felt constrained about who he can be. Now that he has the opportunity to Not Be Hunter, he paradoxically thinks he’ll be more free to become a person who embodies the things he wants to be.

But his heart, which he’s ignoring, wants to go back to the principles that make Hunter be Hunter. Chief among those is love. He wants to learn to love again, but after the ferocious pain of the war and Ms Leading and This Beautiful Life especially, he is too terrified to trust in love and cynical about its worth in regards to him. Maybe it’s also like he’s still too mortified about having ‘betrayed’ Ms Terri’s love by leaving the Lake in the first place, and no longer feels able to associate himself with love? Or rather, he’s unable to trust himself as being strong enough to deal with the world while also being himself, and his heart, if he listened to it, would assure him that he would be able to learn and stabilise without totally disavowing what matters to him? But in essence the Oracles are telling Hunter that he’ll get what he wants simply by being true to himself, which he won’t do.

>1:16 – 1:25 Instrumental
Echoes of the end of Oracles on Delphi/end of The Church and The Dime/end of BSB? ‘Wandering around town’ music though I don’t think Hunter is at the City just yet.

>1:26 – 2:00 Instrumental
Wowww! No idea what this is, but it’s cool!

>2:00 – 2:49 Instrumental
Unsure again, but still cool.

>2:49 – 2:51 The Procession ‘Drums’
Hunter prepares to leave Europe.

Life and Death | Act III
Act IV | The Old Haunt