Well. “Paradise” is quite the contrast to last week’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” installment: where LOHAD is jubilant and optimistic, “Paradise” is quiet and fatalistic. LOHAD features more musicians than I can easily count or discern; “Paradise” features Bruce, and only Bruce. (He plays guitar, keyboard and percussion on this track, although Patti Scialfa’s backing vocals can be heard for a few brief monents.) Left to my own devices, I’d have saved “Paradise” for a later installment at a more somber time, but the dice have spoken, so into the breach we go.
“Paradise” requires active listening, so don your headphones or close the door, and soak it in:
Paradise is one of Bruce’s loveliest and most nuanced compositions. It stays with you long after you hear it.
What’s it about? Even Bruce himself isn’t sure. In a promotional interview for The Rising (the album this song appears on), Bruce admitted, “I wasn’t sure what I was saying when I wrote this song… [it] was instinctive… an intuitive thing that fell together in a certain way.”
If the message is uncertain, the context is clearer: written in the aftermath of 9/11, Paradise is series of vignettes from the perspective of three different characters.
Paradise begins and ends with a soft but growing, pulsing drone. Keyboards provide an atmospheric accompaniment to Bruce’s acoustic guitar and subdued vocals as the first vignette begins:
Where the river runs to black
I take the schoolbooks from your pack
Plastics and wire and your kiss
The breath of eternity on your lips
In the crowded marketplace
I drift from face to face
I hold my breath and close my eyes
I hold my breath and close my eyes
And I wait for paradise
And I wait for paradise
The narrator appears to be a parent and a suicide bomber, most likely in the middle east (“where the riven runs to black” strikes me as a reference to an oil-rich region). He takes his child’s school backpack, replaces the textbooks with a plastic and wire bomb, finds a crowded marketplace, and waits for paradise to claim him, presumably detonating the bomb.
The scene now shifts to the United States:
The Virginia hills have gone to brown
Another day another sun going down
I visit you in another dream
I visit you in another dream
I reach and feel your hair
Your smell lingers in the air
I brush your cheek with my fingertips
I taste the void upon your lips
And I wait for paradise
And I wait for paradise
Bruce has said that he had a particular woman in mind, when he wrote this verse–a fan that he’d met, who’d lost her husband at the Pentagon attack on 9/11 (hence, the Virignia location).
In this verse, color is lacking in her life; each day is just “another day,” each night just “another sun going down.” But in her dreams, she visits her husband, and the detail of her dreams (the feel of his hair, his smell, the taste of the void) stands in marked contrast to her brown reality. And she waits for paradise to see him again.
The scene shifts a final time:
I search for you on the other side
Where the river runs clean and wide
Up to my heart the waters rise
Up to my heart the waters rise
I sink ‘neath the water cool and clear
Drifting down I disappear
I see you on the other side
I search for the peace in your eyes
But they’re as empty as paradise
They’re as empty as paradise
This person is also grieving–and that grief almost claims him. He wades into the river that divides life and death, and goes so deep that the waters rise up to his heart, a clever literary device that makes the listener uncertain whether this river is literal, metaphorical, or both.
In the cold darkness of the river (one of Bruce’s favorite and most frequent metaphors, by the way), he finds his loved one and searches her eyes for evidence that she is at peace–but her eyes are “empty as paradise.”
And when things are about as dark as they can get, Bruce tacks on two final, orphaned lines:
I break above the waves
I feel the sun upon my face
…making it clear that this final narrator does not succumb to paradise, but instead rises once again to the surface and feels sunlight on his face, a sign of acceptance and moving forward.
In the same promotional interview, Bruce says that was trying to say that “hey, all we have is this life, and we have this world, and it’s all we can count on.”
“Paradise” generated some controversy upon its release. Bruce was accused by some of humanizing terrorists during the peak of the nation’s post-9/11 paranoia. And of course, that’s exactly what he was doing. There are many themes that run through Bruce’s work, and one of them is the attempt to understand that which defies comprehension. The suicide bomber in the first verse is hardly the first seemingly unsympathetic narrator Bruce has embraced (one could argue that the protagonist of “Nebraska” is far more difficult to empathize with). What makes this song so poignant, and lovely is the careful empathy and delicate detail that defines and links the characters in their expectations and understanding of paradise.
“Paradise” is rarely performed–Bruce has played it only 15 times ever. It made its live debut on July 30, 2002, at the first rehearsal show for the Rising Tour. Unsurprisingly, it was almost immediately dropped from the set, surfacing only once during the entire tour. The song is too quiet and demands too much focused attention for it to be well served by an arena and stadium tour. However, you can hear that first performance here, notable for Soozie Tyrell’s gorgeous viola accompaniment.
“Paradise” found an on-stage home in 2005, however. Far more suited to the stripped-down, intimate setting of an acoustic theater tour, Bruce performed the song a dozen times, seamlessly switching from an electric keyboard to an acoustic piano between the second and third verses to great effect, telegraphing the determination of the final point-of-view character to find his paradise in the here and now. Watch a gorgeous performance of this arrangement, performed in East Rutherford on May 19, 2005.
Have a different or personal take on “Paradise?” Share your thoughts below!
Paradise
Recorded: February-March, 2002
Released: The Rising (2002)
First performed: July 30, 2002 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: August 13, 2005 (Vancouver, BC)
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Hi Ken – here’s my take, written in 2012 and posted on SongMeanings.com (under the moniker of McMucker.
PS: love reading your Roll of the Dice stuff.
This song is about two women who strive to reach paradise. The first is a mother who is also a suicide bomber – we know she’s a mother because of the motherly reference to the school pack. A man wouldn’t be referenced this way. She is from the middle east – as referenced by the black river, i.e. oil. Check out ‘Seeds’ and ‘Goodeye’ for a similar reference to oil (and therefore money/riches/dreams/reason for war etc)
The suicide bomber carries out her role thinking this will take her to paradise. she might be right – what do we know.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, lives another woman who has lost her lover/partner/husband and longs to find them again in Paradise. Given this song is from ‘The Rising’ you could read that the second woman lost her soulmate to an act of terrorism which emphasises the parallel stories or draws out some irony perhaps? One’s suicide is an act of terror the others’ is because of an act of terror.
Anyhow, the second woman, whilst trying to drown herself realises that actually the paradise she seeks probably doesn’t exist, so she doesn’t actually carry out the act.
This is a big statement. On the one hand we have a woman placed in the middle east who is convinced that her act of terrorism will give her rites to paradise. She does this whilst knowing she will be leaving behind her child – that’s how convinced she is that her Paradise awaits her. On the other hand we have a woman who is willing to end her life because she feels so cheated by life that she’d rather give hers up if there’s a chance to be with her partner again.
The last two lines of the song, to come after the last chorus, leave a very poignant end to a very simple but incredibly deep meaning song. I play it a lot because of the many levels the song reaches – it’s an absolute fab song – my wife just thinks the song is slow, dull and crap.
What does she know eh!