A Night On The Town

A Night on The Town
I’ve been misplaced in so many ways
Broken battlegrounds, hiding veils of delicate deceit
Yet here I breathe
Teeth still gleam from holy water
While millions of lambs migrate to the slaughter
My head in a bag and my hands are bound to my feet
And voices sing

“Were we erased like common thieves?
Tossed in a cell to feast with the fleas
All because we never had written a word”

What will I see, tonight, in these eyes?
And what will I know when the morning comes?
What will I see, tonight, in these eyes?
And what will I know when the morning comes?

Must we remind of exchanges existing so long ago?
Would we arrive at agreeable musings?
Sentimental or just confusing?
We lost what we had, but we took it back
Friends in the gutter, enjoy one another
Just give yourself to the dust and the dirt where you stand

What will I see, tonight, in these eyes?
And what will I know when the morning comes?
What will I see, tonight, in these eyes?
And what will I know when the morning comes?

I’m not who you think I am
And even if I thought you’d known
I never would have told you so
And more alarming
I would have done the very same
Would have stole more than your name
Would have cursed and brought the world on your shoulders
I was in the wrong place at the right time

And what’s the worst I’d see
By giving myself to the earth below me
Not knowing how far I’d fall, by casting away the ordinary
Just how long can I stay in illusions formed here long before me?
And how long can I breathe this stolen breath here underneath?

There’s that subtle smile that did me in
She moves
An agony reminds where I’ve been
She breathes
“I’d never let this happen again.”
Where’s your heart?
Mimicking the patriarch
She’s naive

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Friends of the Son, who Hunter did not realise existed, take him barhopping across the City. Hunter successfully manipulates them into abandoning their doubts when they notice discrepancies between him and the Son, making Hunter reflect on the immoral person he has become. The group enters a bar where Ms Leading is working as a bartender, and after rejecting her concern about his situation, Hunter passes out drunk.

What’s in a name?
This is one of those ‘what is says on the tin’ song names — it’s recounting Hunter having a raucous night on the town, hanging out with the boys and getting piss drunk.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:15 Instrumental
Man! The energy on this. Sets up our setting too — it’s the roaring 20s, the City is bustling, and hijinks are imminently afoot.

>I’ve been misplaced in so many ways / Broken battlegrounds, hiding veils of delicate deceit / Yet here I breathe
Among all this bustle is Hunter, stricken by the fact that he’s not dead or busted yet. It seems now that he has time to pause and appreciate the grandeur of where he is, he’s realising he has no clue how things have managed to be so favourable for him. Like he sounded pretty convicted in Waves that this life as the Son would work out, but now that it kinda is, Hunter’s like, ‘wait, why is this working?’.

‘I’ve been misplaced in so many ways’ -> There are so many ways I should’ve broken/this should’ve fallen apart by now. Saying by itself there are so many situations he just fundamentally shouldn’t have been in in the first place, since they weren’t situations Hunter was in any way suited to.

‘Broken battlegrounds’ -> In retrospect it’s a miracle that I got through the war.

‘Hiding veils of delicate deceit’ -> It’s also a miracle that I’ve not been caught out for my false identity yet. Several years have passed since he’s started living with the Mother, with her being his primary social contact while easing himself into this identity. By now though he’s starting to branch out and go out more to do things, to the point that the Friends are able to know where he’ll be and kidnap him. These being ‘veils of delicate deceit’ also suggests that the character he’s been having to play, and lies he’s been having to remember, have gotten more detailed and intricate.

‘Yet here I breathe’ -> Hunter’s amazement first of all at his literal survival through the war, and at his continued success at subterfuge under the Son’s identity, but also a sort of amazement at the relative freedom he’s managed to secure. Hunter’s still able to (and does) fundamentally conceive of himself as Hunter — his inner conception hasn’t been subsumed by the stress of feigning the Son yet, so the world is like his oyster right now, if he wants to take it as such.

>Teeth still gleam from holy water / While millions of lambs migrate to the slaughter
Hunter sights the Church, which is still busy. Hunter isn’t aware of the Priest’s dual nature as the Pimp yet — his contempt for the Church in this line reflects a more general sentiment that the Church as an institution itself is corrupt or illegitimate, building off of Hunter’s general disillusion with God as of Mustard Gas.

The start of the characterisation of the Congregation as lamb and sheep — for the aspect that they are innocents easily manipulated by TP&P (hunter is being cynical and zeroing in on this aspect of what churchgoing represents — unsuspecting people kowtowing to malicious authorities), but also because that’s common terminology for faithful Christians.

I wonder if some kind of service is going on? If it’s nighttime and the City is bustling, that’s not the typical timeframe I’d imagine to be going to Church unless something was happening.

>My head in a bag and my hands are bound to my feet / And voices sing
While Hunter is distracted watching the lines of people entering the Church, a group of scoundrels abducts him!

>”Were we erased like common thieves? / Tossed in a cell to feast with the fleas / All because we never had written a word”
Psyche — it’s just the Son’s old friends, and they’re playing a prank on the ‘Son’. Enough time has passed that they’ve been wondering where on earth he’s been, since the war has been over for a while and still nobody has heard a word out of him (his life with the Mother must be quite reclusive). They’ve taken it upon themselves to stage a joke kidnapping to force him to remember they exist and to hang out.

The reason they were forgotten, though, is that Hunter just didn’t know about them. They didn’t write any postcards to the Son, nor were they referenced in any of the postcards the Mother had written to him, so Hunter didn’t discover them when he was rifling through the Son’s belongings.

That all said, it’s water under the bridge. The Friends release Hunter from this little interrogation and free him from his bindings, happy to see him again and keen to take him along on a wild night of barhopping.

>What will I see, tonight, in these eyes?
Hunter agrees to go barhopping with the Friends (it’s not like he has a choice). He is highly conscious of the mask he is wearing and unsure of what a typical day in the Son’s life actually looks like, so being around these people who hung out with him routinely is going to be a learning experience and a test. He opts to stay passive, just going along with the group, though curious of where they’ll be taking him.

>And what will I know when the morning comes?
This experience will also tell him more about the Son who he is trying to become. For how great Hunter initially figured the Son was, Hunter doesn’t actually know much about him.

Drinks and barhopping commence, Hunter and the Friends starting off their run.

>1:30 – 1:38 Instrumental
Hunter’s disguise begins to slip and the Friends begin to feel something is off — Hunter is failing to pick up on the group’s injokes, dynamics, and references to old conversations. The Friends begin to question Hunter.

>Must we remind of exchanges existing so long ago? / Would we arrive at agreeable musings? / Sentimental or just confusing?
Hunter attempts to get the heat off him by insisting that there’s no need to ask questions about him remembering or not remembering certain things, as it doesn’t give any particular benefit and tonight is a night to have fun.

>We lost what we had, but we took it back / Friends in the gutter, enjoy one another
Hunter insists that the Friends instead enjoy in the company and camaraderie of finally having their long-lost buddy back after that horrible war and having this opportunity to hang out, laugh, and go drinking together. The Friends are receptive to this argument.

‘Lost what we had, but we took it back’ -> ‘We can say that with these hands, we took it all back’. Hunter lying his butt off.

>Just give yourself to the dust and the dirt where you stand
Hunter drives the point in by insisting that the group continue barhopping, which they agree to do, distracting them from the issue. Hopefully, as they get drunker and become preoccupied with all the fun they’re having, they’ll forget they had suspicions about Hunter.

>Chorus Repetition
Hunter’s argument is successful, the Friends drop their unease, and another round of barhopping commences.

>I’m not who you think I am / And even if I thought you’d known / I never would have told you so
Oh my God it’s Hunter’s ‘normal’ intonation it’s been so long boy where have you been. But yes anyway while the group is having all this fun, and while Hunter himself is laughing along with them and chugging his pints, behind the mask he’s having a soberly introspective moment about how he is deceiving and manipulating these people.

He was successful at persuading the Friends not to suspect him and to in fact dismiss the issue entirely, but even if they had kept their guard up enough to figure that someone had stolen the Son’s identity, Hunter nevertheless would have kept silent on the matter and still pretended to be the Son. Further, we can figure that if the Friends accused him, he would have insisted that he is the Son and not come clean under the accusation. He is recognising his commitment to this persona has become strong enough for him to defend it with flagrant lies, and this devotion to the persona is stronger than whatever conscience against deception he still has. Hunter is just becoming a worse and worse person.

>And more alarming / I would have done the very same / Would have stole more than your name / Would have cursed and brought the world on your shoulders
But even more alarming than his willingness to manipulate others to sustain this facade, Hunter realises that he would actually be willing to kill the Son for it. It’s unclear if this is a hypothetical ‘if I went back in time and had to redo this situation knowing what I know now…’ situation or if it’s a ‘woah, if the circumstances back then had been just different enough that he hadn’t conveniently died in the Somme…,’ but whichever way, Hunter would have actually, without any hesitation, and in absolutely cold blood, murdered the Son for this.

I think it is the former more than the latter though, Hunter’s attachment to this facade has become so immense that it’s more than compromised his morals; it’s made it a joke to think he even has any.

>I was in the wrong place at the right time
Really nice line.

‘I was in the wrong place’ -> ‘I’ve been misplaced in so many ways’ — Hunter shouldn’t have been in the war in the first place, as he didn’t belong there.

‘At the right time’ -> All the same, what he got out of it in the end was positive enough that he’s satisfied with how it went. Really like how twisted this sounds. Hunter’s become quite corrupt.

>And what’s the worst I’d see / By giving myself to the earth below me
Kind of hard to explain but, it’s basically Hunter posing the hypothetical question of how negative his life could really get (so far his life as the Son has been peaceful) by continuing to embrace and commit to this sin. ‘Giving myself to the earth below me’ echoes ‘give yourself to the dust and dirt where you stand’ — where he was urging the Friends not to question things and to basically degrade themselves by continuing to go with the unsuspecting flow of getting super drunk, but the ‘earth below me’ more than just the idea of ‘don’t ask questions, just continue acting in the moment’ also evokes the idea of hell, and from there the idea of sin.

Hunter knows that sinners generally do get punished, but is questioning when that punishment will happen and if it can really be anything so bad as to make this life not worth it. Really peaceful music behind this and leading up to this — Hunter is generally comfortable with the life he has as the Son right now, and has made peace with his lot as he considers it.

>Not knowing how far I’d fall, by casting away the ordinary
Follows up on the previous line; Hunter basically resigning that he’s already so deep into sin and was doomed to fall inescapably into sin once he left the Lake. If this sin is all he really has left it’s not like he has an alternative but to accept that he is just a bad, sinful person and make do with that. There is a kind of peace in accepting this. (Hunter does not realise how sinful he is going to get).

>Just how long can I stay in illusions formed here long before me?
Straightforward question — Hunter wonders how long this life will last and how long he’ll be able to mirror the charade. The fact he even asks it implies he is not confident it will last forever, something must surely come to a head eventually.

>And how long can I breathe this stolen breath here underneath?
‘Gasping for air, with the lungs of a lark’. Hunter is presently comfortable ‘breathing’, or ‘functioning’, or ‘living off of’ the Son’s life. He is conscious of the possibility that factors in the Son’s life could make it too oppressive or smothering for Hunter to continue feeling like he can function while living it — but it’s not like he has countermeasures of what to do if that happens, he is just wondering if and when it might.

Honestly I would figure that Hunter’s solution if he got to that point would be the same thing he always does, running away, but what throws a spanner into him actually doing it when things go south this time is that he holds a public office (everyone knows him) so the leverage of TP&P’s blackmail is too great (his reputation will inevitably follow him, not to mention criminal charges).

>4:37 – 6:06 Instrumental
a BUNCH of fun and raucous barhopping, with Hunter putting his emo existential contemplations aside and fully immersing himself in the moment of all this fun with the Friends. Naturally he is also getting super drunk.

>6:06 – 6:26 The Bitter Suite I Reprise
Hold up, who is that?

Oh my.

It’s Ms Leading.

>There’s that subtle smile that did me in
Yeah, turns out Ms Leading is working as a bartender now, and in their spree of hitting every joint in the City, Hunter and the Friends have rolled up into her establishment. All the raucous fun that Hunter has been indulging in shuts off instantly as he focuses on her, in fact unable to focus on anything but her in this moment. Hunter is both entranced by her presence and very drunk right now.

‘She had the summer’s smile with winter’s skin’. She’s smiling that same summer smile to the patrons, Hunter remembering the feelings this exact smile evoked in him years ago, and still softly is evoking in him now.

Exact intonation as back then, too. Aw Hunter.

>She moves
It’s exactly the same as when they first met — even now, her graceful motions transfix him. Maybe her bringing drinks to the table.

>An agony reminds where I’ve been
For all Hunter has tried to become the Son, this simple sight of Ms Leading is enough for his chest to ache and for the pain of his heartbreak to come welling back up. Hunter’s past asserts itself firmly in his heart and mind.

>She breathes
Again hearkening to Bitter Suite I — with the extra weight that the word ‘breathe’ has over Act IV and Act V, she seems to be doing alright, aside from her being alive and real. Maybe her breathing out long and slow in recognition of Hunter?

>“I’d never let this happen again.”
Hunter persuades himself not to accept the temptation of melting back into Ms Leading. The option to just let himself fall in love with her, throw away his prospects as the Son, and dive into a repeat of Act II is assuredly present right now.

>”Where’s your heart? / Mimicking the patriarch?” / She’s naive
Ms Leading recognises Hunter among the group of Friends and seems alarmed. She questions what’s happened to him (’Where’s your heart?’), but Hunter curtly rebukes her (’mimicking the patriarch’ — ie, he responds rudely, as the General would) and dismisses her as naive for being concerned about where he’s wound up — his life as the Son is obviously better, he has become more mature than he was in the past, and he’s not looking for a repeat of the mess and heartbreak that would assuredly happen if they got together or even associated again. He probably pretends to the Friends that he doesn’t know her.

>7:45 – 8:06 Mustard Gas Reprise
Drunk beyond his limit, Hunter passes out. You can kinda hear him already slipping out of consciousness on ‘she’s naive’.

>8:13 – 8:45 Wait Reprise
Not sure the specific significance of Wait here (though it is a Hunter and Ms Leading song, so maybe Ms Leading is doing something?), but Hunter does need to wake up at some point and this sounds a little bit ‘sun shining through the windows-y’ alongside it being Wait.

>8:46 – 9:00 Instrumental
This probably is just a transition into Is There Anybody There; the day might be bright but Hunter’s head is not, he feels horrid after that bender and probably has a hangover on top of a lot of questions and identity issues wrought by this night.

Remembered | Act IV | Is There Anybody Here?