Shadowfiend23 @ Wrocław

“Come Downstairs And Say Hello”

Comments:

I love this song for many reasons.

First, I think the first two lines brilliantly summarize the main problem of the narrator of the song (and the problem I have felt many times when listening to this song):

Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes
Right in tune with “Dark Side of the Moon.

A person is applying the: “turn on, tune in, drop out” mentality to escape from their problems. Dorothy is escaping from her nightmarish Oz by clicking her shoes in tune with “Dark Side of the Moon”, an album by Pink Floyd. The song progresses by proposing what I always hoped to hear when I was in one of these moods “Be calm…be brave…it’ll be ok”. But the song acknowledges that it doesn’t happen, that it could have happened:

Someone, someone could tell me:
Where I belong;
‘Be calm, be brave, it’ll be okay…”

The song continues to drive home the point that media provides a point of solace by saying that the voices on MTV have lips moving, saying “It’ll be ok…” The way this line is delivered has always echoed the superficiality that condolences have carried in my opinion. The singer delivers this line so ephemerally that I believe it parallels perfectly the short-lasting effects “It will be ok” has on my psyche.

The first “chorus” is very interesting and very, very, profound in understanding the meaning of the song:

To tell you the truth, I’ve said it before
“Tomorrow I start in a new direction”
One last time these words from me
I’m never saying them again
and I shut the light
and listen as my watch unwinds…

The first three lines are especially important, because the narrator makes a vow to change soon, he says that he will change starting tomorrow. He echoes the call to action in the beginning of the song “no more…living underground on New Year’s resolutions”. And he says that this is the last time he will say these words. Then, he describes the act of shutting off the light, a night time prelude to sleep, a symbol of what is done each and every day. Then, he listens as “his watch unwinds”, that is, he is a passerby to his life passing before his eyes while nothing changes. The pace of the song changes here significantly – it picks up to show the passage of time.

The next stanza confirms the foreshadowing in the chorus, as the narrator repeats what he said he would never say again. But there is an added thought, something new to the mix. He states:

Every night as I’m falling asleep
These words repeating in my head:

And then we receive the climax of the song, the take-away message:

“Voices calling from a yellow road
To come downstairs and say, ‘hello.’
Don’t be shy, just say ‘hello.'”

We are told that the narrator can still break free from his escapist mentality, we see that he can choose to rejoin reality and just “come downstairs and say hello”. And this message is delivered with an homage to the imagery in the beginning of the song, to the image of Dorothy trying to come home.

The song ends by repeating the chorus again, cluing the listeners in on the fact that the narrator is still working on living in reality, on not tuning out the world. (There is also a subtle change from “these words” to “those words”, indicating a change of tense) We are left with a beautiful, peaceful, image (which is close to my heart since dreams hold such value to me):

Every night as I’m falling asleep
Those words repeated in my head.