No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun

Because I’m so fascinated by this song, I decided to try my best to decipher its lyrics. Here, I use decipher to mean two distinct things: first, I had to decipher the actual words — the distortion Wilson applies to his voice makes him nigh-unintelligible; second, I wanted to understand the actual meaning of the lyrics in the way one might understand a poem.

Let’s start with the lyrics (see more Insurgentes lyrics). They are, clearly, incomplete, but there are some lines I’m pretty sure about:

[[No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun]]

Draggin’ a lake
Find the owner of the voice
I zip in the bag
And drove all across the noise

Examine the hairline
His archives in the strands
He turned into something
That puts the weakness in my hands

I see what I suppose
I breathe what I dispose
Black wheels get yellow in the sand
I steal every idea that I can

(something something) shadows in the lake
(something) she (something) beside (something)
(something something) in a car
(something something) in the dark

Interpretation

The first line, draggin’ a lake at first seemed incorrect to me. But I realized (read: was told by a friend) that “dragging” is the process that law enforcement uses to search bodies of water for… stuff. For example, you could “drag a lake” for a murder weapon. So if this is indeed the first line of the song, Wilson is setting a somewhat mysterious tone and we should be thinking about crime.

The second line, find the owner of the voice, is then related to the lake-dragging: the lake is being dragged to locate, presumably, a corpse. We might also suppose, on a very direct level, that the “owner of the voice” is a person who screamed and then died (and now we drag the lake for his body). But, since this is Steven Wilson, we can also hypothesize that he has something more fucked up in mind.

Specifically, lines 1 and 2 might not be directly related. Instead, since Wilson is into surreal stuff, it could be that the narrator of this song hears a voice in his head. This second interpretation will make more sense later on.

Line 3 I’m somewhat less clear about. I also hear I zip in the bank, which completely throws off my entire interpretation. If line 3 is indeed I zip in the bag, then this, for me, produces images of body bags. This is consistent with my guess that someone is dead in a lake, the lake is dragged, and the corpse is then placed into a body bag.

Verse 2 lines 1 and 3 only reinforce this: examine the hairline / his archives in the strands means, to me, nothing other than identifying someone by looking at the DNA (archives) in their hair (strands).

Lines 3 and 4 of verse 2 are puzzling, though. He turned into something / That puts the weakness in my hands might mean that he, the corpse, is so mangled that the narrator’s hands are weak. This is a pretty big stretch though, and so here I reconsider my secondary hypothesis: that the narrator has a voice in his head, and it is the owner of this voice that “turns into something.”

Verse 3 is even more troublesome. It may even be inappropriate to call it a “verse”; it functions more as an interlude than anything, and I have trouble deriving any meaning from the lines. The last verse is almost completely incomprehensible, so I won’t bother trying to interpret that either.