The Old Haunt

The Old Haunt
Hints of a higher hand, lost on the Somme
Past deeds would never lead the mischief to a christening and
Gears twist and grind away, sped up to speed
While echoed silhouettes deliver to an early dream

Held out of love but gripped too tight
A breath left hanging in the air

You want to leave your home
But you don’t want to lose control
And there’s far too many ways to die
Far too many ways to die
You want to keep your soul
Above the ocean floor
But there’s far too many waves to try
Far too many ways to die

Take a tip from me, I swear I’ve seen it all before
The fear of what could be will keep you from wanting more

Held out of love, but gripped too tight
Left up, hung In the air

You want to leave your home
But you don’t want to lose control
And there’s far too many ways to die
Far too many ways to die
You want to keep your soul
Above the ocean floor
But there’s far too many waves to try
Far too many ways to die

Never could we keep these things from happening
Never found a way to keep the love in me
Took too long to speak, and never stopped to breathe, to breathe
We read the risks hand in hand
A ruined rest, but now we wake up
We cut our teeth on foreign plans
Then cursed the air, but now we wake up

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
As Hunter prepares to disembark Europe and return to the City, he cements his action plan in transitioning from being Hunter to being the Son. He is determined to throw away his life and identity as Hunter, thinking he can secure both a better life and be a better person as the Son.

What’s in a name?
‘The Old Haunt’ — aka ‘The City’. I know there’s a storytime answer saying that this SONG represents Hunter’s return to the City, but I think that has to be paraphrased wrong or something because there’s no way you can convince me it doesn’t happen at the end of Waves. So this song being called Back To The City would be more in the vein of ‘Hunter Thinks About What He’s Gonna Be Doing In The City’, or ‘Preplanning For A New Life’, pointing to how he’s going back to the setting of Act II now that he has significantly changed as a person.

Act IV takes place in the 1920s. Age-wise we can estimate Hunter to be in his mid- to late- twenties.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:25 Instrumental
Unsure for both of these passages, but they’re cool. Contrast of how aggressive the intro here is after Rebirth drives home how chaotic/dark Hunter’s mind/life is right now.

>Hints of a higher hand, lost on the Somme
Oh no calm down Casey. That’s going to be my response every line, now, isn’t it. ‘Stop shoving so many ideas into what look like simple lyrics! But actually keep doing it!’

Okay, ‘hints of a higher hand’ -> higher hand being in the sense of a poker hand: Hunter deduced from their time together (and from those postcards he peeped) that the Son had a better life than Hunter. Going further, with hands representing deeds as well, Hunter thinks that the Son is a better or superior person to Hunter. Trying to assume his life means trying to model himself as a better person, and playing the ‘hand’ effectively.

‘Lost on the Somme’ -> The Son died in the Battle of the Somme. Hunter has taken his ‘hand’ now.

>Past deeds would never lead the mischief to a christening and / Gears twist and grind away, sped up to speed
‘Past deeds would never lead the mischief to a christening’ -> A really, really poetic way of Hunter saying that his actions up until this point have been bad, immoral, sinful… not in a sense of being purposefully evil (it is just ‘mischief’ after all), but in the sense of never thinking things properly through and impulsively responding to things with dumb reflex. He is dismissing his old self as immature and does not think anyone who knew of his past would think he was a good person. So if he wants to play the Son’s hand properly, he needs to stop doing the kind of stuff he kept instinctively doing as Hunter.

‘Gears twist and grind away’ -> ‘Gears turning that no wrench can attack’, ‘look at that toymaker, grinding his gears’… gears are a new keyword. They seem to represent working, but working in the sense of doing something strenuous (if they are ‘grinding’) but worthwhile; action, things happening. That said, in Hunter’s case here, I wonder if it’s more representing his ‘machinations’ of how he’s planning to assume the Son’s life, gears in his mind graunching and turning.

‘Sped up to speed’ -> Hunter has come to the conclusions on how he’s going to proceed forward; he does not feel ‘stuck’ anymore and things instead feel to be moving.

>While echoed silhouettes deliver to an early dream
Ok ok ok. ‘Echoed silhouettes’… Kneejerk would be in reference to the Son’s Mother. Hunter knows from peeping postcards the Son received from home that he had a good relationship with his mother (‘she always loved her son’), and Hunter is fantasizing about securing that good relationship for himself and reclaiming some of the safety and security he had with Ms Terri. Basically fantasizing about being able to reclaim the same, or a similar dynamic to what he had with Ms Terri, only with it being him as the Son and the Son’s Mother.

This is an early dream, though, so it’s a bit premature. He has these ideas about how his life could turn out so much better now, though in reality he doesn’t know how the Mother would respond to him or how effective he would be as the Son, and he hasn’t done anything yet that substantially defines this new life as better, either. He is just thirsting and anticipating what he could get if he plays things right.

>Held out of love but gripped too tight / A breath left hanging in the air
‘Held out of love’ -> Hunter’s primary motive for all the actions he’s taken so far. Hunter opted not to dig into Ms Terri’s secrets in Act I out of love, then devoted himself to Ms Leading out of love; these fonts of love and prospects of love are what kept him stable.

‘But gripped too tight’ -> So when those fonts of love failed him — largely because of his own over-attachment to this love — he became unstable. Hunter is saying his approach to love has again, been immature and moreso desperate. His dependence on love ruined him and his need to attach himself to love is self-destructive.

‘A breath left hanging in the air’ -> Really nice line. ‘So take all the wind from my lungs, if you’re out of air’; Hunter’s fundamental self is not able to function (breathe) without love and he broke himself irreparably by dismissing Ms Leading, though it’s maybe not as specific as that as much as, Hunter is conceding that he (being as Hunter) is too weak to function without others babying him. I mean that’s a crude way of phrasing it, given how elegant the line is, but basically.

>You want to leave your home / But you don’t want to lose control
‘You want to leave your home’ -> Hunter doesn’t want to be sheltered. As in 1878 and The Lake and The River, he has always wanted to become… well, his own person. He wants to grow and mature outside his strict comfort zones.

‘But you don’t want to lose control’ -> At the same time, Hunter only feels stable and in-control when he is in a sheltered environment. ‘But I just broke right down for you in an attempt to gain control’. We know what the consequence of him losing that control is: he threatens to rape his girlfriend, runs off to war, steals identities, and does other impulsive dumb antics.

>And there’s far too many ways to die / Far too many ways to die
You can take this literally as his experiences with death in the war, but it’s moreso a ‘death’ on the metaphorical level. That is, it is far too easy to do things, and get stuck in patterns, that are contrary to your ‘true self’. Hunter sees that his ‘self’ is easily challenged and often feels forced to compromise his thoughts, opinions, worldview, principles, so on in ways that corrupt who he is and that he can’t take back. For example: Hunter leaving the Lake was a death, Hunter sacrificing his life with Ms Leading was a death, Hunter becoming a soldier was a death, and his taking of the Son’s identity is a death.

‘Betraying yourself is too easy’, basically.

>You want to keep your soul / Above the ocean floor
Hunter wants to be a good person.

>But there’s far too many waves to try / Far too many ways to die
A ‘wave’ in this sense represents a ‘course’, specifically a ‘life course’. Since Hunter’s methods of choosing what to do with his life have so far been impulsive, he feels easily swept into making massive changes in his life that heavily challenge his self-perception and effectively turn him into a new person. Well, kinda. He’s still Hunter at the end of the day.

Hunter is considering the options of where he could go from here and feels overwhelmed. He is terrified of picking a course that just ends up harming him again, or that leads him to betray himself again.

>Take a tip from me, I swear I’ve seen it all before / The fear of what could be will keep you from wanting more
But Hunter chastises himself for these timid thoughts. ‘The fear of what could be’ is the fear of dying or in other words messing up again/destroying himself further, but if he doesn’t allow himself to have some kind of hunger, then he’s just wallowing in a miserable life that doesn’t satisfy his desires.

Phrased like a shoulder-devil temptation kind of deal too since this ambition is coming from a dark place and will like everything wind up kicking him in the boot.

>Held out of love, but gripped too tight / Left up, hung In the air
That entity you call ‘Hunter’ is already dead, yo. Probably more to this but can’t figure it.

>Never could we keep these things from happening / Never found a way to keep the love in me
Hunter resigns that he was powerless to alter his fate — the Oracles obviously offered him outs, but Hunter’s mindset was always such that he couldn’t take them, too determined to soldier on with the principles he thought were right. He also resigns that he has become jaded and lost most all of the love, hence joy, that predominated in his early life. Further, with love being Hunter’s driving principle up to now, you could figure that maybe he would have been able to keep ‘these things from happening’ if he had managed to keep the love in him — not left the Lake, not rejected Ms Leading, not been jaded by the war, so on. ‘This cold calloused heart in a cave of a chest’ — Hunter feels empty and incapable of giving love right now.

Probably also Hunter resigning that he’s only able to keep the love in him if it’s externally sourced; ‘the well has run dry and I with it’, which means that he doesn’t regard himself as an intrinsically loving person anymore.

>Took too long to speak, and never stopped to breathe, to breathe
Interesting. Hard to read.

‘Took too long to speak’ would imply that you were quiet for too long, but positioned against ‘never stopped to breathe’ gives the impression that Hunter was speaking too much. Not really sure. General impression I get though is that Hunter is regretting not being more calm and thoughtful in his past.

>We read the risks hand in hand
‘But the right hand hates the left’: Hunter reflecting on his decision to leave the Lake, knowing that he was going into dangerous territory.

>A ruined rest, but now we wake up
‘Sleep, sleep through your woe’: Hunter reflecting on his time with Ms Leading, but dismissing the experience, or rather what he wanted to get out of that experience, as illegitimate/unrealistic.

>We cut our teeth on foreign plans
Hunter reflecting on his experience in the war, where he truly came to experience ‘reality’ and lost most of his innocence — ‘cut his teeth’.

>Then cursed the air, but now we wake up
‘Scream at the sky and beg’ — Hunter reflecting on how much he hated all of life’s seemingly intrinsic suffering, and the figure that would allow it, but focusing now on his own naivety for expecting life to conform to his ideals (it’s a pretty silly thing, to curse the ‘air’). Hunter is resolved now to move forward in a more grounded and more realistic fashion.

Man, that strength on the ‘wake up’ is incredible. Probably also Hunter resolving to properly become the person he wants to be, under the Son’s identity.

>4:24 – 4:36 The Lake and the River Reprise
Hunter is setting out to open a new chapter of his life where he can become his own, more defined, stronger person. This reprise is much more grim than how it appears in The Lake and the River — Hunter is approaching this new life from an attitude of corrupt cynicism rather than of freedom or hope, and will ruin himself for it.

Rebirth | Act IV | Waves