I love the story of this song, the parallels between being trapped because of your greed and because of your selflessness. It goes something like this: the poor wolf (or, boy, singer of song) who was lured into the well by a cunning fox (or, hot sexy girl, decidedly not the girl singing in this song), laments his sorry state of living, only to be resurrected as a lighthouse worker, who feels still trapped by his personal responsibility for potential shipwrecks.

Only one person on SongMeanings mentions Karma in a glancing blow, saying it's more Eastern karma than Christian karma and I don't know anything about that. I do know that it makes sense, that your resurrection / rebirth should, in some way, be funny and punishing. How apropos is it that the foolish wolf / Win Butler / boy who couldn't even take care of himself is reborn / resurrected / reincarnated as someone who has to take care of loads of other people?

They're all lessons learned. What Dreams May Come (the book, not the Robin Williams movie) touches on this a little bit. Massive spoilers: at the end when the guy saves the girl, the people in charge go: "Yeah, that's great and everything, but no," and force reincarnation, and because she killed herself with sleeping pills, she has to go back as some African girl with chronic insomnia her whole life. How great is that!

So just think about that next time you think about how miserable you are. Maybe you did something really lousy in a past life that you're paying for now in some warped and twisted way.* Try to enjoy it!

Not that I believe any of that. You never know, though.

* This is all kind of fun because you can look at really gross fat people, the kind of fat people that make you feel sad, and then think that they were probably really vapid super models who OD'd on tons of coke, or, you know, rich beautiful people who lived selfish beautiful lives and now they are fat and sweating in motorized wheelie carts because their sugar-laden insulin-deprived feet are too numb to carry their gigantic diabetic asses around. With that kind of thinking you don't feel sad for them any more, and can spit on them with ease. Just like it should be.

No respect for land monsters.

Site Note: Hey, look, it's the Feburary 2009 playlist! Where'd that come from?