Love "Angel", not "princess" as it was in the album version. Some of us aren't princesses and don't love princesses. That's why I like this version so much better. Tender nostalgic pain. Perfection.
Casey Kasem's radio show..I listened, but I didn't have friends that made me feel nice. But everything else Mark sings about makes me long for that era.
nostalgia: the ultimate sensation of melancholy when your present existence is devoid of warmth and the future is a gray horizon line of encroaching obsolescence. this song encapsulates this very feeling; the asymptote of doom that is middle age and beyond.
This song takes place in a hospital room. He's standing over a teenage girl---his little sister. She's laying in the hospital bed, unconscious but still alive. He thinks back to a time when they were kids. The two of them were like best friends. But then, as the years counted higher, they grew up and grew apart. In that time, his sister fell into a group of friends who were not good people. They used her. They said bad things about her. In response, she overdosed, and wound up in this hospital bed fighting for her life. This is when he comes to see her, maybe for the first time in a long time. They are alone in the room. The first line of the song is: "I can't let you leave..." The white sheets are the sheets of the hospital bed. He's looking down at her, feeling helpless and wondering how she forgot to love herself. The second stanza is the long held advice he's been wanting to give her, but he could never bring himself to say it until this moment. He thinks maybe the drapes have closed forever on their time together.
Au contraire: Rufus sounds like Mark Kozelek. There's a gap of 6 years between the first albums of Red House (92) and Rufus (98). But the thing is: the two are great artists :)
