Writer's Commentary: Lemon

On Post: Lemon

Date: January 2

Find it here

First of all, sorry about flip-flopping the posts, running the commentary on January 3^rd’s piece before January 2^nd’s. Bad form on my part. Doesn’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things, but it annoys my sense of order.

Good? Good.

The difficulty with “Lemon” is that it pulls for two approaches at once. The song, taken as a whole, is a weird, weird thing. The song is almost entirely sung in Bono’s falsetto and the backing music is bizarre and distorted. If you watch the video, as I did, to get a better hold of the song, things just got odder.

On the other hand, the lyrics themselves, stripped of all that artifice are actually fairly straightforward. The sunglassed one says they are specifically concerned with a man trying to capture a memory using technology. In the writing, however, they are general enough that they seem to be about the idea, in general of capturing the fleeting things in our lives, be they emotions or memories, in a way that lets us look back on them and share them with others.

So to honor both of those disparate halves, I tried to both the lyrics to the forefront and makes the details a little weird. Hence, the abstract diorama as a token of undying love.

Unfortunately, it feels pretty inert on the page. The only line that seems to have any juice behind it at all, for me, is when the girlfriend literally defines what a diorama is to her friend’s query of “What is it?” Otherwise, it is an okay idea undone but blah execution. Hopefully you felt differently, but sadly, that’s how it felt to me.

Interesting side note that did not occur to me until I had already posted Lemon. A friend of mine from college dated a guy for a time who would make dioramas. I believe he did gift them to her, but it might have been something they did together as, like, a bonding craft project. Either way, though, it just shows you that your brain is storing random bits of stuff all the time and that stuff will influence you and leak out in all kinds of ways.

My explanation not ring true? Do you have questions that this piece left unanswered? Reach out and touch me at tim.g.stevens@gmail.com or @ungajje on the Twitter. And, as always, spread the word.