Entry 522: This Bird Has Flown

I once had a girl

Or should I say she once had me

She showed me her room

Isn't it good Norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay

And she told me to sit anywhere

So I looked around

And I noticed there wasn't a chair

I sat on a rug biding my time

Drinking her wine

We talked until two and then she said

"It's time for bed"

She told me she worked

In the morning and started to laugh

I told her I didn't

And crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke I was alone

This bird had flown

So I lit a fire

Isn't it good Norwegian wood?

I was listening to Pandora Radio the other night, as I do sometimes when my podcasts run dry, and the The Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" came on.  I'm very familiar with the song, as I am with most Beatles hits, and I probably could have regurgitated the lyrics on command since age 16 or so, but I never really gave them much thought.  For some reason, though, I started thinking about them this time, and I realized they are pretty awful.  It's a really trite, possibly misogynistic tale.



It's all set to this mystical, Eastern-inspired sitar music, and you're imagining this untouchable, exotic woman who mesmerizes John Lennon with her mysterious ways, before frustratingly vanishing forever.  But if you actually lay out what happens, it's just a dude getting denied in most mundane way possible -- like, it could have been based on any one of hundreds of nights I and my friends had in high school and college.  A guy goes back to a woman's room and sits on the floor (which happens often when you're young, because you're typically hanging out in small, inexpensive residences, without much furniture); he drinks with her for a little while, probably hoping something will happen, but nothing does (she doesn't seem to be into him in that way), and then she gets tired and makes an excuse to go bed; he wakes up in the morning, and she's already left for work.  That's the story.  There's nothing deep or profound about it. 

There are also some parts that don't make much sense.  Why he does he "sleep in bath"?  I would have just gone home.  (I was the type of guy who would walk many miles drunk at two in the morning to get to my own bed.)  If that wasn't an option (he does say he had to "crawl off," so he might have been in exceptionally bad shape), then I would have taken the floor over the bathtub.  I mean, he mentions that she has a rug, at least.  That seems much more comfortable to me than porcelain or whatever bathtubs were made of in 1965.

Also, the lyrics say, "this bird has flown," as if this woman is gone forever, but he's at her place.  Presumably she is going to return at some point later that day.  If he wants to see her again, he could just leave a note, or even stop by to say hi at another time.  She hasn't really "flown"; she just went to work.

After having these thoughts, I did a deep-dive into the song, and I learned that it's supposedly about one of Lennon's extramarital affairs, which makes even less sense.  A key takeaway from the lyrics is that he and this woman don't have sex.  He just drinks her wine and bides his time until it's time for bed.  When does the affair part of the affair happen?  Or is it something else -- like, the woman is actually John's wife at the time, Cynthia?  Or maybe Cynthia is the narrator, and John is the woman.  Her leaving to sleep in the bath is a symbol of them growing apart, and he's the "bird" who "flies" away (to be a rock star), leaving her hurt and alone in her own house.  That, somehow, actually makes the most sense.  And it kinda fits with what Paul McCartney once said about the song:

In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.

Norwegian wood is apparently a slang term for a type of cheap residential siding, and the reference is to watching it easily burn.  But, why would this man have to get revenge?  For what?  If anything, he should be grateful to this woman for sharing her wine.  Is he committing arson because she didn't sleep with him?  That's, uh, disturbing*, and it doesn't tie into the theme of infidelity at all.  The only way it makes any sense is if the "bird" is the one having the affair, and it gets its house burned down because of it.  Aggrieved significant others have started fires for lesser reasons, after all.

*Although, let's not forget John Lennon also famously sang, "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her, and kept her apart from the things that she loves."  And apparently this wasn't just poetic license.

So, I think that it's it.  I think I've cracked the code.  In a role reversal, Cynthia is the boy narrating the song and John is the girl who flies.  Either that or it's just a bunch of pablum by a mediocre poet trying to do a Bob Dylan impersonation.  That's also a possibility.

Alright, I think I've spilled enough virtually ink on a 55-year-old recording that's maybe, like, my 103rd favorite Beatles song ever.  So, I think I'll leave it there.  The last thing I'll say is that I first started listening to the Beatles on my own in the early '90s, and they seemed like such a distant band from a such a distant era, but it would be like a kid today listening to Nirvana.  Maybe that's not as weird as The Wonder Years of today being set in 2003, but it's still messes with my head a bit.  The passage of time never does not confound me.

Until next time...