Hey all. Thanksgiving Break is coming to a close, and it’ll be time to get back to the final grind to end this semester. Our rounds of workshop revisions will also be over, but we all know there’s more to come […]

Okay, so I got home about 20 minutes ago, and I thought I’d look through my old notes from Fiction Workshop I. After rummaging through a few piles of annotations and responses, I came across a treasure trove of a […]

The poem that was chosen as the heading for the first “playlist” (since we’re focusing on sound,music, etc.) of poems in the collection, “To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire” caught my attention after the utterance of […]

So, as a few of you may know, I’ve been listening to an up-and-coming rapper named Kendrick Lamar. If you haven’t heard of him or listened to his music, I beg of you please check him out–he’s doing things that […]

So, while working on my portfolio, I came across this sudden feeling that the specific poem that I was working on needed to have a curse in it! That’s never happened to me before! In the past, I’ve always been […]

The other day, I happened to be glancing over the schedule and I noticed that we’d be talking about Survivor this Friday. And just at that moment, I immediately remembered that I had wanted to right a very brief […]

During our discussion in which we were to place the blame of the microbe epidemic on a specific character in Clay’s Ark, many of us pointed out Eli’s disastrous plan to keep the disease contained within a small […]

Last Friday, Beth made a Google document for us to list our “alarms” which I suppose go hand-in-hand with the “traps” that we have constantly been caught in when reading Fledgling. Among the “alarms” were thoughts […]

Some of you know that poetry is relatively new to me. In fact, I began to write poetry consistently just before I applied to the Creative Writing track. In other words, I wasn’t even expecting to be accepted into […]

I came across the Indie-Rock Folk band Fleet Foxes not too long ago. In 2011 the band released, Helplessness Blues, a song that I fell deeply in love with the first time it blasted from my TV speakers. It received critical acclaim and was considered one of the best songs of the year. The meaning behind its lyrics are still debated to this day. Some people believe that the song is about the American person’s need to become something greater; to find self-worth in the work that they do. Some believe that the song is about a man growing up and realizing that he is not as special and significant, in the grand scheme of things, as he once thought. And others believe that the song is about Capitalism and the dominance of the government on the average person’s life.

Despite what many think, it is obvious that the song is at its strongest at the very end. The rhythm slows and the bass deepens followed by the band members consistently singing: “If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore.” I feel as if the orchard in this statement stands for many things. Like literature itself, interpretations are varied and numerous. I’d love to know what you lovely folks think of the song and its lyrics. What emotions are emitted in the sounds of the combined instruments? What do you see as you listen to the lyrics? What do you think “Orchard” means in the song? Or, better yet, what does it mean to you? Cheers.

The lyrics can be found here: http://rock.genius.com/Fleet-foxes-helplessness-blues-lyrics