Shears wasn’t mischaracterizing his plans: the album is very much about the darkly sleazy experience of a good night out. So what’s my way in to an album about polyamorous nightclub-based sexual deviancy? I mean, it’s not like you can play in bands in New York for half a decade and not come in contact with a scene or two sorta like this (especially if you played Siberia at any point), but I am, nevertheless, a grad student engaged to someone I’ve dated faithfully for ten years. It was one of those revelatory moments for me when I realised what I wanted the album to sound like and how I wanted it to make me feel.Īs a pop listener, this is fantastic! Who wouldn’t want their music to sound like that, right? (Answer: lameazoids!) But as a person trying to connect with a work of art, it makes it maybe more problematic, maybe. And I was dancing, and the DJs put on ‘Walk The Night’ by the Skatt Brothers. And piss! It was disgusting… The most vile place I’ve ever been. There was a cloud in the room, this cloud of man sweat, cigarettes, spilled booze, shit because people were getting fisted, and poppers. I was wearing a little rubber wrestling singlet. I was at a sex party in Mannheim, I was on the dancefloor. Because it’s about… well, let’s just let Jake Shears describe it: Which is sort of a problem for me and their new one, called Night Work. That’s the thing about Scissor Sisters albums now: they’re about something very specific ( Ta-Dah was written in response to the awful times their good friends went through even as the band was becoming successful and traveling the world) but feel like they can be applied more broadly. We are born to die, but hey, flutes are pretty! Maybe one of the most lingering questions of the human condition is how an awareness of horror and a feeling of happiness can peacefully coexist, and even if the lyrics didn’t give us much help, as a piece of music, “Intermission” felt like it had something useful to say. But the dark turn of “Intermission” was such a genuine surprise (the phrases “Jake Shears” and “assless chaps” being very nearly synonymous, after all) that it was the perfect song for the moment.
Setting bleak lyrics against cheerful music is a too– easy trick for pop music to pull when it’s trying to seem artistic, of course, and it usually comes off like the Serious Artist wanted to write happy music without being thought shallow. It had, after all, been described, not inaccurately, as sounding a lot like Emmett Otter’s jug band, and what’s more cheerful than that? But something about the brutal mood in the car made us pay more attention to the lyrics for “Intermission,” a seemingly light orchestral track done up with flutes and strings.Īnd good lord, it just killed us.
#Scissor sisters intermission lyrics full#
The funeral had been full of absurdly fresh-faced teenagers in inappropriate sundresses and ill-fitting lacrosse-team-dinner suits, people wearing their expressions too lightly for the occasion, like they didn’t really know that death is done and final, standing around talking about how they were going to divide up the dead girl’s things-these people being, of course, the same ones, her friends, who hadn’t thought to call an ambulance when the girl passed out, just let her sleep until she didn’t wake up.Īs me and the two people I’d driven down with, all of us old college friends, were making our way from the funeral home to the house for the reception, speechless at the whole incomprehensible awfulness of it all, we put on Ta-Dah to cheer us up. A friend’s younger sister had died from a drug overdose near the end of her freshman year at college, and here we all were, in Maryland, to mourn her. Some funerals feel sad like like a drizzle increasing to a steady rain, and some funerals feel sad like a punch in the face this was the latter kind. Around the time the last Scissor Sisters album, Ta-Dah, came out, I was in Maryland for a funeral.
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