Devil's Arcade lyrics

I think it's a memory from the narrator's childhood. Or it's a weird sex reference.

That song is full of vague things, but the effect of all of them together is astonishing in it's power and in-directness.

I think of the song as a person looking back on his life after death. Like he's flying over everything:

The 1st image is childhood and then imediately sexual: "Those first nervous evenings perfume and gin The lost smell on your breath as I helped you get it in The rush of your lips, the feel of your name..." To me it evikes a memory from the 1st time he was inside his lover during the early stages of a sexual relationship.

The next lines are a direct indictment of the War in Iraq and the Bush administration's overuse of simplistic terms in relation to war and sacrifice: "You said heroes are needed, so heroes get made Somebody made a bet, somebody paid "

Then death is there in your face, but the person talking in the song is actually relating to YOU as that person's body. Again death and the soul is different from the body that was the house for the soul: "The cool desert morning, then nothin' to save
Just metal and plastic where your body caved..." It died and the person is remembering the feeling of being a inhabitant of the body that it is mourning a loss for.

Then there's memories from being in the hospital and being with friends that fought in battles.

Then the end is just memories from life and the beauty of everyday things like waking up in your bed, and making breakfast, and then it's back to what he misses which is life...

That's my take.

I believe Devil's is one of our hero's mature masterpieces on par with The Rising, My City of Ruins and some other's whose names escape me.

I didn't see it quite that way. Here's my take...

Digging up the gun is getting recalled to duty -- having to get all the old gear out of the closet/basement where it was buried. Those nervous evenings of sex, because of the fear that they may indeed be the last moments the couple spend together.

Concur with "heroes are needed" being about service in Iraq.

"Cool desert morning, then nothing to save" is the explosion of an IED, breaking the silence of the Iraqi morning, and destroying everything so there's nothing left to save.

"Metal and plastic" are the prosthetic devices the docs used to replace the body parts that caved.

Slow games of poker are played in the hospital ward, along with another war veteran (LT Ray), while the hero remembers his buddies (Charlie and Jim) who didn't make it back from the war.

In the last verse, the hero hears the voice of the girl from the first voice, saying "I'm here" -- but of course, she's not really there. He wants her to wisper a promise of a "tomorrow" where everything could return to what it used to be, but he's left just wanting.

Wow, I like your take.

I read / hear it this way, too, until the final verse. Because I hear it as the woman IS there, and is trying to give him something to hold onto, something to bring him back, but she's the one left wanting, because he can't believe anymore that life could be that good and simple ever again.

Nicely done. Bringing a tear to my eye.

I agree with all of it as well but i also think that the woman is there with him in the ward...another side note , i don't believe that the metal and plastic refers to prosthetics, you said yourself what it refers to...the ied...and ied is an unconventional bomb that is filled with different things, sometimes shards of metal and plastic.

Why wouldn't she be in the ward; the entire song is in her voice.

Good point.

I see your point -- I thought that during the song's bridge, the hero awakes from his dream (of Charlie and Jim) and is brought back to his reality, where he lies adrift in the sea with no name. And to me, adrift meant alone, alone and unable to return to what was once normal, alone where the only thing he can feel or hear is the beat of his own heart.

Although, re-looking at the last 2 lines, where the beat of her heart is was helps extinguish the bitter fires of his memory of the war... well, I suppose she could indeed be there with him.

Adrift has nothing to do with being alone. You can have 80 people and still be adrift. It's about being lost. He's lost, completely and utterly, and she's trying to bring him back. There's no question about her being there - it's her voice that says, "Don't worry, I'm here. Just whisper the word 'tomorrow' in my ear." The beating heart isn't hers; it's his. She's telling him:

A bed draped in sunshine, a body that waits
For the touch of your fingers
The end of a day
The beat of your heart, the beat of your heart
The beat of your heart, the beat of her heart
The beat of your heart, the beat of her heart
The beat of her heart, the slow burning away
Of the bitter fires of the devil's arcade

Her body, waiting for his touch, waiting for his heart. She's trying to pull him back. The only real touch of confusion is in 'A voice says'. She literally says that to him. He wakes up from his dream, fucked, scared and unbound, and she's playing narrator to try and bring him back in. It's her song.

Okay, you've convinced me, with the exception of the heartbeat in the last 2 lines. "The beat of her heart" -- that one is her heart, and it's her presence that comforts him.

I never looked at it that way before.

It makes the song better to look at it that way.

Oh, I don't know... your "weird sex reference" theory sounds interesting, too.

I'm feeling like you guys have decoded the thing for me. I can't believe that it's the woman's voice.

I had my head up my ass.

$250?

add it to my bill.

Devil's Arcade is done extremely well live. It's a shame that most of the audience doesn't appreciate it.

I know this isn't insightful or poignant or anything, I was just sick of looking at buddhaboner's name for the past 2 days on the front page in this no-mans land of a forum.

Concur. The drum outro bothered me in the studio version, sort of a "hey, Bruce, you do know Max is still playing, right?" but live, it seemed as though Max should have played another bar or two.

Of course, now you'll have to post again or else you'll be stuck looking at my name on the front page.

Really? How it ends makes it very "effective". Just like Two faces from the Tunnel tour. I haven`t heard Devil's arcade live, but the outro on the studio version is one of the things I like best about the song. It`s makes the words even more powerful..The beat of your heart, the slow burning away

Tara had me watch the monitor specifically at the end of Devil's Arcade... as the beat winds down Bruce walks away toward the back of the stage. He stops and is deliberately facing away from the audience towards the back of the stage. When looking at the monitor both Max and Bruce are superimposed over each other in sort of a mist or other dimension type effect. It looks kinda eerie. It doesn't have quite the same effect on the big screen and I believe that's the effect they're going for which is exactly what Chance said.

The beat of her heart is calling to him however he's facing away, either he can't hear her or feel her need. I'm not sure if he ever comes back to her or if he just doesn't come back as the same person, like many soldiers. Either way he's not the same guy that left.
Check it out here: Devils Arcade

The worms in the barrel = cheap and plentiful bait, their lives inconsequential.

I really appreciated having the opportunity to experience this live. Bruce has always been conscious of his stage movements, but I felt that the way this was performed in that respect was really effective, along with the cross-hatched lighting at the beginning and the 'heartbeat' of the red lights behind the band at the end. His (almost ritualized at this point) hand and arm movements, the way he positions his body, very much makes the song more than a song, more a whole performance piece. At the end, when he turns and faces Max in silhouette, unmoving, eyes open, then just walks forward and out of sight was/is incredibly chilling.

I really appreciate that he doesn't put so much study into every song as far as how it is performed visually. It's not that every song is not important in its own way, it's that he choreographs each one individually according to what is necessary to enhance it from a visual perspective. In this he stands apart to me from other bands I have seen live, where every song is of "monumental importance" and overly dramatic. The red lights are almost overkill, but they really do work well.

I was quite annoyed at the frantic movements of many in the crowd to get up the stairs and out to the beer stands when they performed this the other evening. Their (monumental) loss.

Ok, so.... I had already go that it was in the voice of his girlfriend/wife... :-) so, back to the first two lines:

Remember the morning we dug up your gun
The worms in the barrel, the hanging sun

I guess the first line being the idea of being called up for duty makes sense, but what about the second line? Well, on a hunch, I googled "guns worm" and got:

http://mman.home.att.net/WormsRams.htm

Sure enough, a gun worm is used to clean the barrel of a gun. Mystery solved? Now, what does hanging sun mean? That the sun was low in the sky, suggesting approaching darkness I suppose.

I always thougt he was just using imagery to describe noon time.

In the old West when they executed, hanged someone it was at high noon, hence the hanging sun. I felt if he meant approaching darkness he could have or would have used waning sun or setting sun. Just my feeling about it.

I take the worms reference literally, being that the gun has been in the ground for some time.

And he probably wouldn't have mentioned that it was morning.

I also think worms in the barrel means he's a guardsman or soldier called back to active duty.

I think he's back home with her after being in a veteran hospital. "A house on a quiet street, a home for the brave"

He's recuperated physically but he'll never be the same. She's hoping and waiting for the same man inside the body to come back, for the mental anguish and psychological trauma to end.

Seriously?

To me, 'barrel of worms' = the bucket of bait one would use for fishing. Cheap, disposable lives to be sacrificed to get the prized fish.

Nah, you're not being serious. No way.

On first impression I also thought the gun was in the ground as if he was blown up and the gun with him. The worms being maggots eating his rotted flesh. After going through the rest of the song, you see he's alive and it didn't make as much sense.

The actual 'digging up' of the gun puzzles me. I think it's there so he has a way to get to the worms in the barrel line but I'm wondering if burying guns is something that people do (meaning, in a literal way, as a means of disposal - I don't have any familiarity with the handling of guns)` or if it's the same as if someone had 'dug up' as in found ('hey, I dug up that old scrapbook....') Obviously it's something that had not been used recently and laid to rest permanently in what was hoped to be a permanent way but then in need of retrieval.

Long story short: in a literal sense, do people actually bury guns or is this a purely figurative line? Not important as the figurative is what he's going for here, just something I'm too lazy to try googling...

Maybe he's a dog? Like a member of an elite K-9 unit?

Because dogs bury things.




That's it, I'm done.

You'll be back. That's a pretty poor way to go out, unless, of course it's some sort of dig at Sawyer. If that's the case, adieu.

But it's appropriate that he takes his leave in OAN.

CarolJude is going to be crushed when she realises it's not just this thread he's done with. And as for chance, well I hope he doesn't lose marks for handing in tear-stained papers.

From the first listen, I've envisioned literal worms in a dirt-choked barrel, kinda like the turtles eating the skin from a dead guy's eyes.



I don't like imagery of worms and hungry turtles.

I read it exactly like chauncy otherwise.

One other note. I think "The glorious kingdom of the sun on your face" refers to a type of madness. Specifically, the kind that regular people can never appreciate because they can never imagine what it was like to go through what he went through. He is separated from --in a way, lifted above-- the normal life experience.

I was reminded of the story of Moses, specifically the radiant face of Moses when he came down from Mt. Sinai (in Exodus 29-32)

"When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the LORD. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them; so Aaron and all the leaders of the community came back to him, and he spoke to them. Afterward all the Israelites came near him, and he gave them all the commands the LORD had given him on Mount Sinai."

I'm 100% with CarolJude on this. The video on the official site doesn't quite capture the amazing lighting in the show. As Bruce faces Max, a bright pure white light, so bright as to be uncomfortable, blinks on and off down at Max in time with the heavy beats. It's the heart beating from the lyric. Very, very powerful.

Just got a shiver even now, remembering.

Like I said, he's always been conscious of his movement on stage, but back when we were discussing the Today Show and how he was looking right at the viewer during Living in the Future (tm. Bono) I wondered if it indicated that he was thinking about change and innovation in the 'physicality' of his performances. Devil's Arcade seemed to confirm this to me, and I find it very exciting. I think the visual canvas is something he can and will do much more experimenting with, especially as the years start moving more quickly and the players more slowly in a live setting. Perhaps he is thinking of other ways that he can perform to an audience once it becomes too tiring to do what he's always done in the past.

Good point. Them/he filling stadiums in the future, say 7-10+ years from now, is not very likely. Thinking in other directions, maybe more "theatrical" like, by using different effects, not too over the top though. But enough so it`ll emphasize the lyrics, strengthen the experience of the songs and the concert experience as a whole. This might still make him a relevant live artist. In his live act - less bulldozer, more recumbent, but not necessarily inferior.

Them/he filling stadiums, say, today, is not very likely.