Waves

Waves
I thought that I knew love
But it was just a wave crashing over us
And in the breaths between the ones we meant to breathe
I had my head under my feet

You knew the way things were
You knew the way they would be
We knew exactly how it’d end

Strays on a stale sea
I’ll anchor the engine to a canyon far beneath
The water rushed up from the boards below
So I started slicking my hair with the kerosene

You knew the way things were
You knew the way they would be
We knew exactly how it’d end

And I’m preparing for a burial at sea
But I can see the lighthouse
Yeah I’m praying that these waters don’t take me
Cause I can see the lighthouse

I was screaming that the ship was sinking
But you were telling me to just keep drinking
Quartered into parts again
Arms and legs at the bottom of the ocean
And the thing that made it so much harder
Was the fact that you were someone’s daughter

I knew the way things were
I knew the way they would be
I knew exactly how it’d end

And I can see the lighthouse

And I’m preparing for a burial at sea
But I can see the lighthouse
Yeah, I’m praying that these waters don’t take me
Cause I can see the lighthouse

Yeah, I can see the lighthouse

I thought that I knew love
But it was just a wave crashing over us

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
“Waves” is Hunter saying goodbye to love as a possibility and committing himself to his newfound persona and his ambition. Having determined his dependence on love as a massive character flaw, Hunter disavows it as a solution and resolves to become a stronger person as the Son. Specifically, he decides not to pursue Ms Leading as he returns to America.

What’s in a name?
‘Waves’ — we’ve encountered this keyword just in the last song. There’s a massive temptation to read this as literally recounting Hunter on some kind of boat, to mirror VVV with him coming back from Europe, but if he’s already back in the City as of The Old Haunt, then it’s for the metaphorical read of ‘life course’. Basically Hunter talking about how he was overwhelmed and swept along in his relationship with Ms Leading.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>I thought that I knew love / But it was just a wave crashing over us
Hunter 😦 Looking back on his relationship with Ms Leading, Hunter dismisses the feelings involved from either party as ‘true love’ and rather more as ‘dependence.’ Rather, since the relationship didn’t survive, obviously it wasn’t true love. It came and went with a wave’s ferocity, sweeping them along in a way neither of them could control, and ended as soon as the wave passed.

Since that experience was Hunter’s reference point (alongside Ms Terri) for what ‘love’ is, he is now clearly confused as to what constitutes love, though a jaded kind of pretentiousness tells him that whatever love is, it isn’t that. This is an extremely unfortunate view to take because younger Hunter’s innocent affection for Ms Leading was like the single thing he got right. Hunter is too busy dismissing all of his past self as an unreliable idiot to recognise this, though.

A lot of the beats on this song are ones we already got in The Old Haunt (Hunter rejecting his old values so he can reform himself as the Son), but with love being the most important value to Hunter, it gets a whole song to itself in how Hunter talks himself into dismissing it so he can become the Son.

>And in the breaths between the ones we meant to breathe / I had my head under my feet
Wowow Casey slow down. Okay.

‘Breaths between the ones we meant to breathe’ -> We have the sex motif around breath already from Acts I and II, but Acts IV and V focus on ‘breath’ more in the sense of, ‘life’ or ‘essence’. The thing that gives you life, your fundamental essence, pneuma. The breaths they meant to breathe would be the life or energy they found empowering (their happy relationship), so the breath or ‘life’ between those would point to how the rest of their lives weren’t so happy, and that unhappiness was still influencing them (or something they had to live — think of Evicted as one of these ‘between’ moments, where Ms Leading is introspecting on something outside of the happy relationship) in the background.

‘Head under my feet’ -> Not entirely sure, it evokes the idea of ‘head over heels’ while technically being the opposite of that, but basically conjures the idea of Hunter not thinking or of him subordinating his sense beneath his body (and his feelings/heart as being above his head, by extension). Super pithy.

So — Hunter is saying that he was irrational in how he approached this relationship, when considering it beyond the false frame of them being happy unproblematic lovers who both had no baggage. He was neglecting to confront any of his issues by instead immersing himself in the relationship and preoccupying himself with more dreams of Ms Leading. He also did not know how to deal with the prospect that Ms Leading would have baggage herself. In retrospect, Hunter seems to take it as a marker of immaturity, insecurity, and lack of control that he latched on so hard to the relationship as a solution. Simultaneously, it sounds to be Hunter recognising how and why he exploded so hard in Red Hands, and being… really complex emotion, but somewhere between resigned and exasperated that he did, again finding his past self an idiot but not like in a totally mean way.

>You knew the way things were / You knew the way they would be / We knew exactly how it’d end
Ms Leading knew from the outset that Hunter would be scandalised to learn she was a prostitute, and that the relationship would break down once this truth came out. Again, this is Hunter’s evidence against it being true love, as it was unsustainable and required lies to function.

Really like the singing/intonation on this. It’s not accusatory (Hunter’s long moved on from that — he was already not-accusing Ms Leading as of VVV, though he was still spicy about things), but does carry that sense of inevitability to it, like, ‘yeah, we were both desperate.’

>0:44 – 0:56 Instrumental
Just wanted to single this out for being so nice. Not sure if it’s pointing to anything but it does have that kind of nautical flavour to it which again tempts me so hard to say he’s literally on a ship as well as illustrating the ocean metaphorically.

>Strays on a stale sea / I’ll anchor the engine to a canyon far beneath
Really sad lines again.

‘Strays on a stale sea’ -> This is Hunter characterising himself and Ms Leading. If you can imagine Black Sandy Beaches as people stranded on distant, deserted islands communicating by message in a bottle, then this line is a similar sentiment where the people are instead stranded from each other on small, tiny specks of boats dwarfed by the expanse of flat ocean. The sea is so wide and so empty that it would be a miracle for sailors to bump into each other, even if they believe kindred spirits are out there and could conceivably navigate into each other’s presence. Hunter is saying he and Ms Leading were both alone in the world at the time. (’We are broken, alone’).

‘I’ll anchor the engine to a canyon far beneath’ -> Hunter used his pain as his foundation to get him moving. Wow explaining the read here is really hard but that’s basically it. He wanted stability (anchor) after Ms Terri’s death, his response to Ms Terri’s death was emotional (the engine = Hunter’s heart), and his emotional response to Ms Terri’s death was one of extreme deep pain (canyon far beneath), so anchoring his ‘engine’ to a canyon far beneath = him taking his emotional pain as his foundation. Hunter saying that the driving force behind his relationship with Ms Leading was his emotional pain.

>The water rushed up from the boards below / So I started slicking my hair with the kerosene
‘The water rushed up from the boards below’ -> The relationship with Ms Leading began falling apart, and the underlying pain rushed up to overwhelm (drown) Hunter. The old sentiments he was trying to suppress came out violently when the relationship failed.

‘Slicking my hair with the kerosene’ -> Kerosene is an old lice treatment. It’s also an extremely combustible fluid. I think it’s basically pointing to Hunter’s arrogance in how his panicked solution to the relationship failing was to set everything on fire (get aggressive towards Ms Leading) and dump her from his life (removing ‘lice’). This is obviously a desperate and not very helpful response to being on a sinking ship, though it gave Hunter the illusion of control. As with everything else in this song, Hunter is explaining the flaws in how things were handled in the relationship.

>And I’m preparing for a burial at sea / But I can see the lighthouse / Yeah I’m praying that these waters don’t take me / Cause I can see the lighthouse
‘I’m preparing for a burial at sea’ -> Though he desperately hopes against it, Hunter expects that these underlying pains will overwhelm and ‘kill’ him into choosing an inadvisable life course again, before he can properly ground himself.

‘But I can see the lighthouse’ -> But Hunter sees hope! Forging a life as the Son gives him the chance to build something more positive, and founded on the Son’s assumed values rather than on Hunter’s pain, that could prove itself happier and more resilient.

>I was screaming that the ship was sinking / But you were telling me to just keep drinking
Odd to imagine Hunter as the one with knowledge that his relationship with Ms Leading would fail — perhaps pointing to things around the period of Where The Road Parts, with Hunter showing himself to be unbalanced but Ms Leading still desiring to keep the relationship. Hunter was massively struggling around that time about how to deal not so much with Ms Leading’s supposed cheating but with his own emotional response to that ‘cheating,’ and even back then Hunter seemed to regard his own behaviour as so bad as to not merit ‘inflicting’ himself on her anymore (’but I just broke right down for you in an attempt to gain control’).

Which if right, makes these lines super interesting. Hunter would be basically calling himself too dysfunctional back then to be able to sustain a relationship, or at least this relationship, and that Ms Leading was in error to even imagine it could be salvaged, because the problem wasn’t the ‘cheating’, the problem was Hunter himself. ‘Just keep drinking’ is such a good line for this, gives you the image of Ms Leading trying to convince him to go back to pretending everything’s happy or alright (getting drunk) while also telling him to do something as impossible and terrible as drink the entire ocean (suppress all his pain every time it manifested) to keep the relationship afloat. Not that I think Ms Leading would’ve dismissed Hunter’s pain, but that’s how Hunter seems to be reading her intentions.

>Quartered into parts again / Arms and legs at the bottom of the ocean
Of course, it didn’t work. Hunter split apart from the pressure of everything and instead did the whole Dear Ms. Leading shtick.

>And the thing that made it so much harder / Was the fact that you were someone’s daughter
Emphasising that his feelings in Dear Ms. Leading weren’t his real feelings so much as him being stupidly reactive; he doesn’t regard Ms Leading as a whore or a slut or a ‘black widow’, he knows her more intimately than that and fondly regards her as the whole person she is. This makes the whole situation even worse because he can’t just dismiss her as a misleading hooker and leave it at that.

>I knew the way things were / I knew the way they would be / I knew exactly how it’d end
The rhythm from ‘in spite of you’ from Dear Ms. Leading shows up here under ‘I knew the way things were / how they would be / I knew’. You can take that as Hunter having suspicions that Ms Leading was ‘cheating’ from the outset, but I think it’s more like, in spite of himself for this one.

Since Hunter obviously did not know that Ms Leading was a prostitute — the ‘way things were’ would have to instead point to Hunter having some insight to his own mental state, consequently to his inability to keep a serious relationship going.

>And I can see the lighthouse
But it’s alright! Now that Hunter knows that his old pain was what made him so volatile, living as the Son should offer him something more stable that he can build from. You can hear how much of a hopeful and triumphant song this is despite the majority of it being Hunter saying that he absolutely messed up his past relationship, because he’s decided not to put stock into the things that led him into that relationship anymore. He feels like he’s becoming a stronger person with more consciousness of his own flaws and what can be done to avoid them.

>Chorus Repetition
‘I’m preparing for a burial at sea’ -> This time reads more like Hunter resolving to indeed bury himself at sea; that is, let the old Hunter be dead and float off into the ocean so the new Hunter can proceed unburdened to the ‘lighthouse’ of this ambitious and positive new life.
‘I’m praying these waters don’t take me’ -> And this time reads like Hunter hoping to God he doesn’t slip into the temptation of letting himself be Hunter-esque again, and getting caught up in the emotions that dragged him down in the first place, since he can see the lighthouse away from all that drama. You know, since Hunter is going to the City again it does open the possibility for him to find Ms Leading and potentially hook up with her (ala his plans at the end of Cauda), and this might be him praying furiously that he doesn’t accept that temptation.

>Yeah, I can see the lighthouse
Hunter’s insistence and conviction in how positive the Son’s life will be for him suggests he already has some concrete ideas of its potential — probably with the Mother, at least.

>I thought that I knew love / But it was just a wave crashing over us
Hunter concludes that his relationship with Ms Leading was not love. Hence, it was not meaningful, so he can soberly close that aspect of his life and not invest in that feeling again. Simultaneously, this line’s pretty sad — Hunter is not exactly happy to be forfeiting this, but seems resigned to it being too dangerous for him to hold as his core desire if he wants to get anywhere.

>3:55 – 4:12 Ambiance
Okay, this is establishing our new scene… and we hear ship-horns, horses, birds twittering, people chatting… I’ve decided that whatever source says Hunter is already back in the City by the Old Haunt must be paraphrased wrong or something, because this sounds like him disembarking a ship and grounding us again with City scenes.

The Old Haunt | Act IV | At The End Of The Earth