13 Infinite Possibilities

The forthcoming studio release from the Cure, 4:13 Dream (which is scheduled to be released in the US on October 28th) has be the most greatly-anticipated Cure album in the past 15 years.

The growth of the Cure's fan-base on the Web has greatly facilitated the exchange of knowledge, opinion, file sharing and general discussion among fans, literally worldwide. When the Cure play a concert in this day and age, the images and music are broadcast out around the globe in hours, sometimes even bare minutes from the end of, or even during, the performance.

So when the Cure began to play some of the new songs of this album on tour as early as October of 2007 (Notably, the Download festival, where "The Only One" was first debuted as "Please Project" ) and continuing on throughout the 4Tour in 2008, interest in these new songs was fueled primarily through amateur concert video and audio tapings, and limited amounts of rapidly-Youtubed television footage. It is a testament, then, to the sheer raw power and brilliance of these songs, that even a fraction of their real magic was captured and transmitted online.

Far from diminishing interest in these songs, these limited glimpses into a new world of Cure music have helped to stoke interest in the new material to a fever pitch. Indeed, the four singles released during the summer of 2008 shot readily into top of the sales charts worldwide with, in the US at least, a trivially minuscule amount of radio play. That a band can sell so many copies of a recording based almost entirely on interest generated through non-mainstream media channels is unprecedented, and should bode well for the future of the Cure. That they can do it in an age where music is freely available online through simple searches and a minimum of technical ability, speaks to the deep devotion the Cure's fans have to the band. Clearly, their fans care enough to continue to support the Cure through purchasing their music as well as helping to sell out their live shows whenever they tour.

Speaking of fans, I would like to extend a huge thanks to Craig over at Chain of Flowers for his endless patience and love for the band and his fellow fans as expressed through his website and new blog. Chain of Flowers was my primary source of Cure information for many years, and I have been thrilled to interact with Craig and the other fans throughout this past year as the new blog format has allowed us to do. It's been an amazing time, and I very much credit Craig with helping to introduce some wonderful new Cure friends into my life. The music of this album will always bring back fond memories from this past year of attending concerts "virtually". For the shows I did go to, knowing that there were other fans waiting breathlessly for every text, as I had done at other shows, helped to create a feeling of community that is still so amazing to me. I'm happy to be a part of the "family" over at CoF!

With that being said, I'd like to preface my review of the album with the disclaimer that this may not be a "typical" review as I don't have much to say about the more technical side of the music, so that which follows will be informed more by my own interests in the symbolism and meaning of the songs themselves. As usual, my opinions are my own and are in no way meant to be definitive. Rating the songs individually as bad or good is not part of my intent, for ultimately I love the album as a whole and believe each song has it's own story to tell. This is my interpretation of those stories.

(Graphic: A Wordle of the top 13 words on 4:13 Dream)

For an album that abounds with mythical and legendary creatures such as sirens, angels and "The Perfect Boy", the song "Underneath the Stars" begins the album on a note firmly rooted in the physical world while at the same time introducing a beautiful scene of intimacy and love. I will never forget the first moment I heard this song, with the sound of the crashing waves holding me stock-still in amazement. (So much so, that I forgot to turn on my camera!)

Prefacing the lyrics invoking the very creation of the Universe, (13.73 billion years ago, to be precise) the sound of the waves breaking echoes both the watery beginnings of life on earth and the water which cradles human life inside the womb. The scene is set of lovers entwined, floating together beneath a beautiful, starry sky. They lose themselves in each other, and in the infinite possibilities of the universe, held in a moment where the present, past and future intersect. That this song encompasses the most intimate of moments wrapped up with philosophical wonderings about the entire, infinite universe is quite impressive, and even in low-fidelity recordings became an instant and much-anticipated classic. It's musings on love and eternity are bound to place it very high on the charts of those Cure fans who revel in the dreamily romantic songs of the Cure's extensive discography.

Once the soft, dark night of "Underneath the Stars" has faded into daylight and everyone has woken up and had a good lunch, the Cure go in for a bit of afternoon delight in "The Only One", with Robert elucidating the many ways in which he is explicitly delighted by his lover. Unabashed and completely unashamed, this openly sensual riff on an adult repertoire has a bouncy beat and ecstatic rhythm completely befitting the subject material.

Like a visit from a particularly interesting and yet psychologically-unstable friend, "The Reasons Why" brings us out of our hazy afterglow with some jarring lyrics about suicide and friendship. Fittingly released near Halloween, this song seems to speak of someone who is in contact with the spirit world, and who is thinking about joining them very soon. The third-person style of this song is a bit unsettling after the extreme intimacy of the first two songs, however it seems to fit the material more closely, and certainly serves to put some distance between the singer of the song and the ideas expressed within (suicide, right to die). Interestingly, the conversation expressed near the end of the songs calls to mind the same symbolism found in "Underneath the Stars" regarding the infinite nature of the Universe as well as seeming to express some of Robert's belief regarding the afterlife, or lack thereof.

Perhaps driven by a need to get rid of some of the emotional baggage left over from "The Reasons Why", "Freakshow" lurches onto the dancefloor and shakes like a freak until the weight has dropped away and all that's left is a hallucinatory bubble of sights and sounds. Settling itself down next to the hookah in the back room, "Freakshow" leaves the harsh reality of the everyday world behind and pops open a hooky, catchy chorus determined to make you forget your woes. Aliens, swing dancing and a somewhat cranky girlfriend make for a psychedelic trip to the club downtown and you will be singing along even if you don't quite know what "infradig" means

The distressingly short "Sirensong" unfolds itself languorously from the mists of ancient memory, enchants us with glimmerings of golden paradise, leaves us aching rapturously for more, and then, disappears like a wisp of shimmering smoke.

"The Real Snow White" is all grown up and looking nervously around the room at seven dwarfs who want her to visit another kind of cave. Here, the raw, pale underbelly of life is exposed and crawling with seedy sycophants, disorienting drugs, lost time and lost innocence, and Snow White has been left wanting ever more.

Leaving the world of grime and slime behind, and perhaps inspired in a perverse way by the journey through it, Robert waxes philosophical with an exploration of the concept of "The Hungry Ghost". In Tibetan Buddhism, as in many other faiths around the world, the hungry ghosts are "a metaphor for people futilely attempting to fulfill their illusory physical desires". The placement of this song just after "The Real Snow White" seems like a deliberate way to contrast two extremely different states of mind and being. Debauchery and addiction have been cast aside in favor of robes of saffron and somber contemplation, and the effect is extremely thought-provoking indeed!

The introspection continues during "Switch" as Robert begins to question everything about his life, friendships, possessions, thoughts and habits, and ultimately decides that he's changed, but he is not certain why this is so. In this hard-rocking lament, difficult questions abound, the answers are few and far between, and all we can do is suffer alongside Robert on his quest for truth.

Spinning yet another tight vignette of a song into being, "The Perfect Boy" marries a sunny, poppy love song with a jaded, cynical tale of lust and betrayal. The girl believes, and the boy believes too, as long as he gets his way in the end. Fortunately, the song ends long before the optimism does.

"This. Here and Now. With You." is a perfectly Zen moment of clarity expressed in quirky, chiming rhythms and expressive beats. The words and phrases tumble over each other as if the moment will pass too quickly and they will be left behind. The urgency and immediacy of the lyrics weave a story of lovers brought together fatefully, perhaps bringing to mind the illicit relationship expressed in the song "Strange Attraction" from 1996's "Wild Mood Swings".

Resurrected from the "Head on the Door"-era demos, the updated (presumably) song "Sleep When I'm Dead" presents either a waking dream or walking nightmare, complete with conversations with angels and cute baby animals. Hallucinatory echoes reverberate throughout this ethereal landscape and the catchy chorus compels us to sing along, pulling us through the mirror and into an alternate reality littered with divine beings and reflected visions of the world we left behind.

The story of the "Scream" begins slowly, in the springtime, and plays out throughout the seasons as the subject of the song grows progressively more distant and distraught until the final drawn-out scream spins her into a whirlwind of frantic action and emotion. A picture is drawn of someone moving in a slow motion, as if they were in a time-lapse film, as the year spins faster and faster around her, until she is snapped into reality by the intensity of the "Scream" and upon awakening, finally looks around with a lingering sense of horror at the wreckage.

The tone of finality of the closing song "It's Over" takes on literal and figurative meaning, spinning the loss and distress expressed in the lyrics of the "Scream" into an angry return to the grim, drug-fueled world of "Snow White" where time is once more lost and deeply lamented.

The lucid introspection and philosophical meanderings of earlier songs has turned to remorse and self-hatred. The sense of limitless possibility captured in "Underneath the Stars" has turned bitterly, sourly wrong, cynicism rules the day, and the angry howls of disgust are all that are left behind. Launching a sonic assault on our hearts and minds, "It's Over" leaves us hoping desperately that it is not over at all, and that the long-rumored dark album will continue the story much, much further.

Primary Colors of the Cure - Part 2

I hope that you enjoyed reading Part 1 of my short exploration of the colors in the Cure's song lyrics.

Following that train of thought, it seemed to me to be only natural to explore the color palettes presented by the studio albums. As we saw in the first part of this series, color is used to add meaning and emotional impact to the songs themselves. I think it is interesting how an album cover can also be distilled into distinct color palettes which can give us clues as to the overall emotional content of the songs in a particular album. For this blog post I used the color palette tool on the Colour Lovers website which is a lot of fun if you are artistically / creatively inclined and enjoy playing with color.

Here are all of the 13 studio albums as color palettes, along with an image of the album cover itself and a brief commentary on each one.

1. Three Imaginary Boys










Although Robert famously hated the cover artwork for their first album, the visual depiction of the band members as a lamp, a refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner (a hoover) is a now-iconic piece of 80's album art. Produced by the record company, the cover of Three Imaginary Boys was such an irritant to him that Robert insisted on complete creative control over the final product on all future albums.

2. Seventeen Seconds










As noted above, the cover of Seventeen Seconds was the first album cover personally overseen by Robert Smith, and the contrast between the first and second album covers could not be more striking. As the first entry in what would become the three darkest albums of The Cure's early years, Seventeen Second's cover provides a view into the new sound of The Cure after the disjointed pop of Three Imaginary Boys, The stark, minimalist expanse of white is broken by a blur of eerie tree branches and grey, undefined shapes. The splash of red on the lower left corner hints at a surge of emotion coloring the otherwise bleak landscape, and the frenetic lines suggest movement, which is fitting as the Cure's first charting single in the UK, "A Forest" came from this album.

3. Faith











Based on a photograph of the 12th-century ruins of Bolton Abbey in the fog, the moody atmosphere of the cover of Faith presents an even bleaker landscape than that on the cover of Seventeen Seconds. The second of the three dark albums, it offers little respite from the mood previously set into place. Here there is dim light, shades of gray and very little texture, broken only by the small logo and unadorned text near the top left. The brooding hulk of Bolton Abbey towers ominously above the viewer who appears to be lying on the colorless grass at the bottom of the cover. The emotional resonance of this cover is intense, oppressive and more than a little claustrophobic, perfectly expressing the music within.

4. Pornography










The final album of the three dark albums and the first in the later "Trilogy" series, Pornography takes the bleak landscape of Seventeen Seconds, and the despair and hopelessness of Faith and channels them both into a dark swirl of anger, hatred, death, lust and cynical passion. The sighs of gray on the cover of Faith have been replaced by bloodcurdling howls of red and purple, and the pale, distorted faces appear to arise from the black depths of a particularly gruesome nightmare. The narrow, unadorned text at the very top nearly fades into obscurity with its thin, stretched lines. This is the first album cover to feature the faces of the band members, and the only one to feature members other than Robert Smith on the cover. Notably, the three albums which do feature Robert Smith on the cover (Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers) are all considered by fans and critics alike to be the best work of the Cure's extensive catalog, and were the focus of 2002's "Trilogy" DVD in which all three albums were played in concert back-to-back.

5. The Top











After exploring the oppressive darkness of the last three albums, coming across the artwork for The Top feels a little like stumbling into a circus sideshow tent just after visiting the Holocaust Memorial. Many fans of the era were reported to be furious at Robert for abandoning music influenced by the somber introspection that he had been immersed in. Understandably, there should be some confusion about how and why the man who wrote the line "It doesn't matter if we all die" suddenly began to cuddle kittens and sing about caterpillars! The sudden change in mood and atmosphere is vividly reflected in the cover art for The Top, with it's poppy, psychedelically optimistic tones of yellow, red, blue, green and gold. The emerald-green font of the album title takes up most of the front cover, another departure from the previous covers, with The Cure written in gold and larger than on any other cover previously published. The loopily introspective music on The Top is reflected in the bright jewel-toned colors of the album cover as we explore what is the closest thing to a Robert Smith "solo" album that has been published to date.

6. The Head on the Door










A more subdued palette greets us on the cover art for The Head on the Door . Fluttering, indistinct shapes in pastel yellows and pinks arise from a sea of black, overlaid by blue text full of curlicues and organic shapes. Although this color palette is toned down as compared to The Top, the surreal psychedelia of the songs on the album is still well represented by both the colors and shapes on the cover. The claustrophobic pop anthems of The Head on the Door take the hint of absurdity found in the music of The Top and add a hit or two of ecstasy, the swirling guitars of Porl Thompson and an undeniable pop sensibility to produce some of the Cure's first major US hits.

7. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me










With vivid red lips illustrating the album title, the colors of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me show us a more mature intensity that is less concerned with anger than with lust and love. The fiery reds and oranges of the cover invoke the heat of coupling, the desires of the flesh and the joys of union. Many of the tracks on KMKMKM explore themes of relationships and the conflict therein, and this is expressed in both the album artwork and color palette. The happy-go-lucky lyrics of the pop gems on The Head on the Door are gone, and in their place is a furnace of sexual energy and an abundance of sophisticated intellect. Meticulously crafted love songs and catchy pop masterpieces dominate the offerings of this, their 7th studio album. This album was the one that put the Cure on the radar of mainstream music with "Hot, Hot, Hot", "Why Can't I Be You" and "Just Like Heaven" pouring out of radios and onto club floors worldwide. Here the Cure are on fire, and it shows in the colors!

8. Disintegration










Once the fiery flames of KMKMKM had subsided, Robert decided to douse the lingering embers with the deep green waters of his own nightmares, and the result was Disintegration. Famously condemmned by the record company as commercial suicide following such an upbeat, passionate musical journey as KMKMKM, Disintegration proved that the fans were ready and willing to follow Robert into the depths of his own psyche. Here the album cover of the second installment in the "Trilogy" provides yet another visual glimpse into the watery, emotional heart of the Cure. The dark green depths of the cover are broken by shadowy, silhouetted flowers and a hauntingly pale gaze upward. The psychedelia here is less concerned with colorful eye-candy than with the veiled, introspective gaze which explores the shadows of the heart. The only counterpoint to the deep and pale greens here on the cover of Disintegration is a touch of brown which could even represent the viewer grasping for a place to stand while sinking into the dark.

9. Wish










Back on dry land once more, a surge of happiness suffuses the cover of Wish like a breath of fresh air from the circle of blue sky on the cover. One of the most commercially successful Cure records after Disintegration, the lyrics and music of Wish present a vision of the day breaking after the gloomy depths of midnight have passed. The colors on the cover present a happier Cure, with optimistic blue skies and white fluffy clouds surrounded by bright reds and oranges. The strangely compelling, iconic artwork by Parched Art draws us into an exploration of the meaning and imagery of the album cover and promises an optimistic view of love and life. Uniquely, the cover of Wish seems to have inspired more Cure tattoos than any other album artwork. From the commercial hits "High" and "Friday I'm In Love" to the lush promise of "To Wish Impossible Things" and the epic masterpiece "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea", the Cure is in love, and so are we.

10. Wild Mood Swings










Fittingly, the cover of Wild Mood Swings features a windup clown toy, because this album represents the Cure at their most playful. The bright primary colors of the cover reveal songs which are very much mood swings, alternately coy and condescending, playfully erotic and heartbreakingly sincere. This album features some of the happiest Cure lyrics ever written, and some of the most underrated songs of their oeuvre. From the "gorgeous strawberry kiss" of red to the honey-colored yellow and tender-hearted blue, the clues to the moods of Wild Mood Swings are written in bright tones throughout the album and the cover.

11. Bloodflowers










As the self-described third part of the Cure's career-spanning "Trilogy" of albums, the cover of Bloodflowers is a near-explicit echo of the bleak understatement of the cover of Seventeen Seconds. Here we see the stark whites and blood reds, the dense blues and greys of that cover, but portrayed with much more intensity and depth. The mariachi band of Wild Mood Swings has decamped and the paper streamers from last night's party are but pale tatters fraying in the wind. Here the colors of the foreboding winter moon has brought us through the night to dawn and we understand that with age brings wisdom as well as bitter realization. On the cover of Bloodflowers, we return to the pale forest of Seventeen Seconds and Faith, but have brought both a compass and a friend along, so that this time, the journey is not nearly as lonely or as disorienting.


12. The Cure










Perhaps remembering the incoherent nightmares of his own childhood, for the cover of the Cure's self-titled 2004 album, Robert asked his numerous nieces and nephews to draw pictures for him and then compiled them into the artwork for The Cure. The resulting effect takes all of the unspoken night terrors of pre-adolescence and distills them into a creepily subdued palette. The muddied colors evoke the fear of that spooky old mansion down the street, the yellow color of the wash of light from the porch light and the purple shadows lurking in the yard after midnight. The colors and disconnected childish cartoons of the cover let us know what to expect, and what not to expect from the Cure's 12th studio offering.

13. 4:13 Dream










Returning once again to the Parched Art aesthetic which was missing from Cure covers for 16 years, the cover of the forthcoming album 4:13 Dream is sprinkled with effervescently optimistic colors which highlight the shadowy shapes and hand-sewn detail of the watercolors on the front of 4:13 Dream. Bright flashes and splatters of yellow, pink and blue surround the hypnotically glowing red eyes of the central mask-like figure which echoes the pale faces of the cover of Pornography. The stars invoke the much-anticipated opener "Underneath the Stars" and the surreal, dreamlike shapes bring to mind the hallucinatory lyrics of the new singles "Freakshow" and "Sleep When I'm Dead".

As with many other Cure albums such as Wish and Wild Mood Swings, the themes of the main album are repeated and expanded upon on the covers of the singles, creating a coherent and immediately recognizable visual theme, which is reinforced through use of color and style. Here, the overall effect is one of entering a bright daydream where the echoes of the past Cure albums reverberate, informing and infusing the new works with the spirit of the old.

A Final Note:

It was while writing this article that I first noticed that the three "Trilogy" albums are the only ones to feature Robert's face on the cover (albeit more abstractly with Pornography) and thought that it was interesting that they are the ones which Robert Smith considers to be the most representative Cure albums. Certainly others have noticed and remarked on this phenomenon before, however it was not something which I had thought about before doing this analysis of the album covers. It definitely made me wonder more about the process that they go through to produce the covers, and whether Robert's confidence in the material is what inspires him to put his face out there on the album, or whether that has even been a conscious decision on his part. If you have any insight into this process, please leave a comment or message, I'd love to hear from you!

Primary Colors of the Cure - Part 1

Color plays a huge part in helping to set the tone for many of The Cure's songs. From somber to upbeat, the world through the eyes of Robert Smith is awash in color, and colors in the world of the Cure are very closely tied to the emotional content of the songs themselves.

If you can, try to imagine the color references removed in lyrics such as those in "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea" or "Watching Me Fall" and you can get a sense of how important color can be in adding meaning to these songs.

In the music of The Cure, the colors gray, black, red and white are often used in connection with emotions such as despair, anger, fear or hostility, while green and blue are more commonly associated with songs involving love and relationships, good or bad.

Here are ten of my favorite color-associated Cure songs. What are some of yours?

1. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea
2. One Hundred Years
3. Watching Me Fall
4. All Cats are Grey
5. A Short Term Effect
6. Caterpillar
7. Burn
8. Gone
9. Primary
10. Wrong Number


Finally, if you'd like to explore further into the colors of the Cure's songs, here is a tool called a Word Tree, into which you can enter various words and see what other words are linked to it. Type a color word such as blue, green or red into the text box and you can immediately see which lyrics contain it. This also works for other words such as love, hate, anger, kiss, dream, ocean, etc. The number in the upper left corner indicates how many times the word appears in the document.
Have fun!



The data feeding this little application is the same Cure Lyrics document I used in the 13 Impossible Words post.

13 Impossible Words

I'm a geek and a poet, a writer and an artist, a programmer and a statistician. Throughout my time as a fan, one of the major draws of the Cure's music for me has always been the literate, intelligent and beautiful lyrics of the songs.

A favorite tactic of Robert is to write songs based on books and poetry, and compress them into a coherent, lyrical form. The brilliant condensation of "Les Yeux des pauvres" into the song "How Beautiful You Are" is a perfect example of this. However, the vast majority of the lyrics simply come from Robert's own life experiences, thoughts and feelings. As I have explored previously in this blog, there are common themes which permeate the songs, such as descriptions of the ocean, the stars, sun, moon, nature, cities and of course, relationships and the vast range of human emotion. Taken together, they describe a life lived fully and offer an intriguing glimpse into the heart and mind of a modern-day poet.

As a geek, I have always been fascinated by the visual depiction of data, and when the Wordle applet was released upon the world this summer, I played with it several times but never had the chance to do what I always wanted to do with it, namely, run a dataset of all the Cure's lyrics through it! Well, now my Cure lyric geek / artist / statistician desires have been fulfilled, and I present to you two sets of Wordles. I'll give you some background on how the data was handled after you take a look at the following:

Top 13 Words in Cure Lyrics
(click to explore)

Knowing about the themes that recur in Cure songs, when I first ran Wordle with the Cure lyrics dataset, I was a little surprised to see the top 13 composed of these words! And a big shock was that the most common word in all of the lyrics was the word Never, followed closely (and not nearly as shockingly) by LOVE.

Here are the top 13 words in numerical order, with the word frequency count next to them.

1. Never (288)
2. Love (237)
3. Want (198)
4. Time (187)
5. Always (166)
6. Know (163)
7. Away (151)
8. One (143)
9. Ever (139)
10. Nothing (137)
11. Go (135)
12. Get (128)
13. World (124)

I love how poetically these words go together, and the way that the Wordle depiction puts them together creates an artistic vision that can be read in many ways. These words manage to distill many of the important themes in the Cure's music into short, 2-3 word sentences that convey a great range of meaning and emotion, in concise, haiku-like form.

Here is a larger dataset in Wordle, of the top 300 words in Cure lyrics
(click to explore)


About the data:

The Cure lyrics analyzed here were taken from a document available online. This document is fairly comprehensive, containing lyrics for demos and other rare tracks. I am not certain of the source or editor, or I would be happy to link back to them. In order to clean up the dataset for analysis, I removed most of the extraneous information such as brackets and album titles. I didn't spend an extreme amount of time cleaning it up however, as Wordle removes a lot of unimportant data such as often-repeated common words (and, the, if) and pronouns (you, me, my). I also manually removed the words "like" and "just" as common words. You can access the raw text that I created here, if you'd like to play around with it in Wordle or another analysis engine for yourself. I've also made the dataset available on Many Eyes if you'd like to try a tag cloud or word tree there.

Finally, just for fun, here's a Wordle of my blog :


Update: Cure Lyrics Word Doc by aussietiger - Thank you!