The calm and lyrical song The Stable Song by Gregory Alan Isakov carries a deep and multifaceted meaning. This song is either about pain or about love, or maybe about both. After all, love is often pain. Love often brings disappointment and sadness, especially when it is non-reciprocal or when a loved one has betrayed you.
In this song, the author tries to talk about his pain, about his feelings for the person who brought this pain. The author is trying to get away, to escape about what is happening to him. But it is not so easy to forget, let alone destroy your memories. Every moment past moment speaks with tenderness and nostalgia of a wonderful time, the lines speak of this: “Remember when our songs were like prayers / Like gospel hymns that we called into the air”
“Stable Song” is a poem “about everything.”
In words, an artist can’t seem to deal with the stress that comes with success. He is under tremendous pressure to compose something perfect (diamond) and instead decides to return home where he can go back to basics (charcoal) and regain the energy of his youth.
As stated in his autobiography, he loves to talk about life, events that take place on his way in songs. So here, we see all his feelings that he expresses at the moment.
The song screams: in the heart of Gregory there is a lot of pain, unrequited love. Every person who has ever experienced unrequited love wants to somehow express his feelings, sensations that lie like a dead weight on his soul. Despite all these mixed feelings, the song is quite calm. But its meaning is very deep. Forgetting what brought first positive and then negative feelings is not as easy as it seems. So it is with him, there is a dissonance: he is trying to get away from this inner pain, just to run away from it all. On the other hand, positive emotions also haunt, remembers them with nostalgia and tenderness.
You can also understand the meaning of stones as a symbol of marriage. The song is a reference to his wife. In his words, this topic is very veiled. The author gives the reader to think, to think out what could have stumbled upon his idea to write the words for this song.
Another theme is the simplicity of man. It’s not just that the text mentions the stable. What do people associate with this word? Freedom, air, loneliness, separation are antonymous concepts that play one of the main roles in the words of the text. One line shows that this lonely man was dragged into the mud, sent to where he wandered. Why did this happen? There are two possible outcomes. The first of them: the person was dissatisfied with everything, did not want to change anything in himself. People realized that he would not survive in this ungrateful, devouring world. For him, he is very weak. The people tried to help him with something, but he did not accept their “handouts”, and he died in insignificance. The second option – a person is satisfied with everything, nothing is needed in life, the main thing is calmness, peace. He is ready to lie in the hayloft and think about the meaning of life.
If a person falls head over heels in love, then after parting, he will have a long recovery in all areas and meanings. This attachment to a partner is like a drug that is difficult to give up. The songs express this pain very well. Any listener will be able to notice these feelings in them. So it is here, all this can be traced.
The meaning of “The Stable Song” – Gregory Alan Isakov
But is it really so? Is this track just about how the soul hurts? Or maybe something more? As the author himself says this song “this is a poem about everything.” And one cannot agree with this, because in almost everything living and inanimate, there is a small particle of love. There is love in the artist’s painting. Does it mean that this song is also about art, about how cool it is to write pictures, poems, create jewelry.
On the one hand, yes. But from another angle, the song does not talk about art as such, it only talks about love and grief experienced, and love is everywhere, but grief is not everywhere. Therefore, the song is a kind of metaphor for the love of art.
Just above, I mentioned jewelry. The text contains the lines “Ring like silver, like gold/… /Ring like wedding bells/…/I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell/…/Turn these diamonds right into coal.” From them we can conclude that the song is about jewelry. No, precious metals are used as a comparison in this song, that is, the ring is not made of gold or silver, but has the meaning of “gold” and “silver” for the author, that is, this ring, made of non-precious metal, is dear to me, like a ring, made of silver or gold.
From these facts, we can conclude that the author of the song sings about his wife or ex-wife. But what happened to her because of what this song was written? The author himself does not answer this question. Do we need it to understand this song. The question is debatable for building a complete picture and a better understanding of this work, an answer is needed. But if we discard these data and peer into the text, we can trace the idea of the simplicity and insignificance of the literary hero of the work.
In the lines “Now I have my stomach covered with straw on the table / Well, I drank and sang, and walked in the stable / … / Well, I dragged you straight into the dirty ground / And you sent me to where I wandered” it is clear that the man is a farmer, a commoner . But it is not clear what exactly the author wants to show by this. There are several options, the first one is that a person is simple, therefore they abandoned him, he did not want to change and died in insignificance and poverty, such that he could be covered only with straw. The second option is that the person is far from everything earthly, that he doesn’t need anything expensive, he just likes to live next to the stable and it’s good for him to lie in the hayloft and he doesn’t have any negative dirt near the stable, which eventually stopped liking his wife.
After a long relationship, a person becomes strongly attached to a person and cannot imagine life without him, therefore, often, when a person leaves, the partner begins to worry and feel sad about this, this greatly affects the mental health of a person. The lines “Well, I’m damned, and I cried, but now I know / … / And I again ran to this emptiness” speak about the fact that a person is ill and that his mental state is not in the best possible way. But everything ends, but there are moments when everything starts anew and the pain only intensifies and makes itself felt.
Over time, the wounds heal and turn into scars that do not hurt and do not ache, but which do not let you forget the past, but there is no more pain from memories, now this is a story that you can share with friends and loved ones, this is an experience that you must rely on in the future .
