Turn all of the lights on over every boy and every girl Open all the doors and let you out into the world Yes, it means ‘time for last orders’, but closing time can also indicate closing of a chapter in your life, and while the two words taken by themselves are ambiguous whether or not that closing is positive or negative, I think without a doubt in Dan Wilson’s world, it’s overwhelming positive.
Like many of the song analyses I’ve done for this site, I don’t think ‘Closing Time’ is as simple as most people think. And yet they have, because their marriage is one built with so much strength. Even when 2 years ago, when they had to say their final goodbyes to their young daughter who had been born with a birth defect, they were each other’s rock as I sat there at the funeral, feeling dumbstruck by grief, wondering how they would continue.
Turned out he was better suited for our friend anyway, and they ended up getting married, which I am so thankful for because they are one of the few couples I know who support each other through everything. We had the music thing in common, surely he’d be interested in me. (See? Even back then I was hopelessly drawn to musician types.) I turned up for a friend’s birthday party where I was supposed to meet this guy, but he only had eyes for another one of our friends. So much that one of them tried to set me up with a guy they knew who boasted he could play the song on guitar and he knew all the words too. It became so large in my ‘mythology’ (I’m being sarcastic that’s why mythology has single quotes around it) that my girlfriends all knew how much I loved that song. I pick up song lyrics quickly, and in a world where we generally only listened to regular radio on boomboxes and the internet had barely become a thing, ‘Semisonic’ quickly became one of those tunes that I had on repeat not only on my pathetic sound system at school, but also in my head. The song spoke to me instrumentally first, with the lyrics feeling right for the music, but its meaning didn’t really come to me until I started thinking about what songs I might want to analyse on Music in Notes in 2014. To say that ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic was a song that defined my and my friends’ lives in school would be an understatement. And knew when to break out the air guitar during the solo. There is a small group of songs, definitely numbering less than 10, that I would say I recall sitting in the back of one of our friends’ cars, with the radio turned way up, and everyone knew all the words too. Where to find it: ‘Feeling Strangely Fine’ (1998, MCA) Also, seeing that the writer has already explained the meaning of his song, this post is now closed to comments. Personally, I think it’s strange anyone would use anything related to a bar and drinking as a metaphor for the birth of a baby, but that’s artistic license. A woman with a science background (doubly weird, considering my main vocation) wrote a post a couple days ago, reminiscing about the birth of one of her children, tying this event in with Dan Wilson explaining in 2008 what the song is about. Most of the album's lyrics are just as revealing as "Completely Pleased," just not quite as revolting.Update 18/01/15: this past weekend, this post was inexplicably barraged by comments, which I thought was a bit strange, given that I posted it on Music in Notes a year ago. The worst example of Semisonic's sensual downfall is the song "Completely Pleased." Not only is the song musically inferior to the majority of the other tracks, lyrics like "I wanted to see you come/come, completely pleased" are a little more than anybody needs to hear. Track after track shows that Semisonic needs to use the considerable songwriting talents of Wilson, Jacob Slichter, and John Munson to further explore other areas of everyday life. Feeling Strangely Fine, however, allows the motif to overtake the album. This is never more evident than on the fourth track, "Never You Mind." It doesn't help that Semisonic lead singer Dan Wilson adds his piano to many of the album's tracks, and that Semisonic and Ben Folds Five seem to share a dominant motif, sensuality. Both employ a variety of different instruments, thus creating a sound that is sometimes very, very comparable. While the first single from Feeling Strangely Fine doesn't necessarily show it very well, there is a lot of Ben Folds Five in Semisonic.
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