Great Songs: "The Skin of my Yellow Country Teeth" by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Listen to it at the band's MySpace page. I can be hung over and full of chocolate, you put me on a treadmill and play this song and by the time the first chorus kicks in I will be actively engaged in trying to make my heart explode, it's that rockin. A song about the neverending incremental change of life, the fact that a single continuous "I" that persists through time is really nothing more than a useful working model of what consciousness is. There's the boy with the shotgun shooting down honeybees that sting, but the boy could use a little sting, which is a perfect metaphor for resisting painful positive change, which seems to belong to the earlier, West Virginia part of the protagonist's life. Immediately after he's asking to go to a party, talking to someone who 'looks a bit like coffee'. I take this to mean that in New York the country boy has been exposed to people he never would have met back home.
All crappy analysis aside, this is a perfect song. All the more shocking is that a band which nearly always sounds like a cross between Pablo Honey-era Radiohead, The Violent Femmes and Rufus Wainright sould some up with something so perfectly perfect.

Once - The dogs have quit their barking

"Son," - my neighbor said to me."

Know the emptiness of talking blue

the same old shoe.

"Run - I'll do no more this walking

Haunted by a past I just can't see

Anymore

Anymore

But let me tell you I have never planned

To let go of the hand that has been

Clinging by its thick country skin

To my yellow country teeth

Far - Far away from West Virginia

I - Will try on New York City

Explaining that the sky holds the

Wind the sun rushes in and a child

With a shotgun can shoot down

Honeybees that sting

BUT THIS BOY COULD USE A LITTLE STING!

Who - Will get me to a party?

Who - Do I have yet to meet?

You - You look a bit like coffee

And you taste a bit like me

How - Can I keep me from moving?

Now - I need a change of scenery

Just listen to me I won't pretend to

Understand the movement of the wind

Or the waves out in the ocean or how

Like the hours I change softly slowly

Plainly blindly oh me oh my!