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The Saints are Coming Song Meaning ( See Actual Lyrics)
"The Saints are Coming" Song Meaning
"I don't think anyone will ever be able to believe in us that much that they're going to try and suss out what the lyrics mean."
These are the words of a young Stuart Adamson, way back in the 1970s, when he and Richard Jobson were being interviewed about their band The Skids. For all those not in the know, Stuart Adamson was a crazy guitar player, and he went on to start the band Big Country and have a fairly successful career before committing suicide in 2001.
Adamson developed a distinctive bagpipe-esque sound on guitar, and was an innovator all the way down the line, which made him a hero and mentor to many guitarists, including U2's The Edge.
He was also the nougat-y center of fan worship surrounding The Skids, the biggest Scottish band to come out of the 1970s punk explosion. Many fans found Richard Jobson's lyrics pretentious and overly obscure, but according to Stuart Adamson, he and Jobson were an unstoppable songwriting team, and The Skids were "a lyric-based band."
This is all to say that what The Skids lyrics meant was actually pretty important to them, and very worth considering now that their underground hit, "The Saints are Coming," has been revived (and revised) by Green Day and U2.
Punk Politics
Believe it or not, there was a time when it wasn't unprecedented for a punk band to put out a politically charged album. Back in the late 1970s, all The Skids music was political (according to them). They wrote songs about struggling through the suburban wasteland ("Sweet Suburbia"), and about the fucked-up-ed-ness of war and government ("Into the Valley," "Working for the Yankee Dollar").
And then there's "The Saints are Coming." Like "Working for the Yankee Dollar," this song could be about the Vietnam war, or maybe just war in general. The story seems to be about a child waiting for his father to come back, whether physically or psychologically, from a conflict of some sort that has overtaken his life. Thus, "How long now / Until the clouds unroll and you come home,
the line went. /But the shadows still remain since your descent."
The song is full of the apocalyptic imagery of clouds, storms, floods, and drowning, which points to the theme of war in general. This works on a large scale because, as we all know, during periods of war, we all get to live in fear that any day the whole world is going to go to hell and we are all going to be fucked.
The stormy apocalyptic imagery is also what connects the more global struggle to the personal struggle, as a flood is something that flows from the natural world and into our bodies and imaginations. In this song, this happens both thematically and in a more concrete sense: "A drowning sorrow floods the deepest grief." As the song ends, we arrive at the disintegration of a relationship between father and son due to inner struggles which are destroying the father. "This paternal guide once had his day," but no more, the speaker seems to say.
It would be easy to dismiss the lyrics as those of a youthful rebel shaking of the influence of a disinterested parent, but the great big chorus, "The saints are coming! The saints are coming!" forces us to reconsider. The statement is so large and cryptic; it indicates that there are things of great significance coming to pass in the course of the narrative.
Those Saints, They're Up to Something…
Hmm, we've definitely heard something about saints coming or going or kickin' it oldschool somewhere before. Of course we all know where, and as Homer Simpson put it, "How I want to be in that rumba." But what is the name of the song?
When it was first written in 1896 by Katharine Purvis, the song was called "When the Saints are Marching In." Since then, it's been called "When the Saints Go Marching," and when "The Saints Come Marching," among other things. This is very interesting, because it would seem to make a pretty big fucking difference whether the Saints are coming or going.
After all, saints are kind of like the original superheroes. They have these whole bodies of mythology built up around their daring deeds, people adore them and pray to them for help in times of trouble, but at the same time, they're very mysterious. Do they exist, or don't they? Are they real, or are they hoaxes?
As the western world has grown over the last century, be it ever-so-slowly, into a secular society, saints have gradually been replaced by superheroes. Why? Because we need to believe in something, have faith that in moments of "drowning sorrow" and "deepest grief," someone will come along and save us.
Of course, deep down, we all know that saints and superheroes don't actually exist, but our desire to believe in their existence symbolizes our desire to believe in the human good, and to never give up on the idea that when worst comes to worst, we will help each other, and take care of each other, and that ordinary people will do extraordinary things, and the world will be a bearable place in which to live.
So when The Skids tells us that "the saints are coming," rather than "the saints are going," they might be sending an optimistic message that the world is going to be okay, because good people exist, and help is on its way, rather than retreating in shadows as in the image of "a descent," at the beginning of the song.
The Saints Have Always Been in New Orleans
The song "When the Saints Go Marching In," has always been an important song to New Orleans. It was originally a slow, spiritual hymn, but NO jazz and Dixieland flavor eventually popularized it in its more upbeat form, an evolution we see right before our eyes in The Simpsons, when Lisa plays the song for Homer.
This transformation happens on a regular basis at New Orleans jazz funerals, where the slow version is played on the way to the cemetery, and the up-tempo version is played on the way back to celebrate the fact, one might suppose, that the saints are coming rather than going, that life goes on, and is ultimately a cause for celebration.
"When the Saints Go Marching" is the perfect example of a song that has been transformed over time to meet the needs of the times. Like "The Saints are Coming," it was originally a song with many apocalyptic overtones, speaking of a time when "the sun refuse to shine," and "the moon turns red with blood." This is because Purvis wrote the song to be about the apocalypse, when the world ends and all the saints are marching into heaven.
But somehow it became a song of celebration, and those who play it in Dixieland style sing less about the blood moon, and more about "when the rhythm starts to go," and "when the sun begins to shine." Like our desire to believe in superheroes and saints, the metamorphosis of these lyrics is representative of the human spirit's capacity to love life in the face of sometimes insurmountable evidence supporting a very contrary perspective.
The Skids Come to Dixieland
"When the Saints Go Marching" has long been a rallying song for the New Orleans Saints. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, The Skids "Into the Valley" has long been a rallying song for Dunfermline Athletic, the band's hometown football team. For this and all the other reasons noted above, "The Saints are Coming" seemed like the perfect song for Green Day and U2 to revive in honor of New Orleans.
But Green Day and U2 didn't just revive the song, they also revised it. Although butchery of classic songs is often the target of derision amongst music know-it-alls, in this case it seems appropriate. After all, the song's progenitor, "When the Saints Go Marching In," has been revised multiple times, and by the musical denizens of New Orleans itself. A revision then, of a song revived in their honor and for their benefit, makes a lot of sense.
The biggest change to the song is a verse reflected Green Day and U2's political opinions, added by Bono during the Superdome show on September 25th:
"We're living like birds in the magnolia trees
Child on the rooftop, mother on her knees
Her sign reads, 'Please,
I am an American.'"
This verse is a pretty sad reminder of how terrible Hurricane Katrina was, how slow the government was to respond, and how brutally many people were treated. Despite the fact that the heart and soul of America was suffering in the aftermath of the storm, many people - particularly poor, black people - were treated as though they were the millions suffering in third world countries today, ignored by the American government as it rushes to cover its ass in more profitable areas, and worries about people that are worth more money.
The other major lyric change comes at the end of the second chorus, when instead of Jobson's "the stone says / This paternal guide once had his day, /
once had his day," Billie Joe and Bono sing: "How long now? / The night watchman lets in the thief, / What's wrong now?"
This lyric can be interpreted in two different ways. On the one hand, maybe it's referring to how those who are supposed to serve and protect us completely let us down during Katrina, letting the thief in the front door, as it were. On the other hand, maybe it's referring to what some call the crime sprees in the wake of the storm, which others interpret as the desperate struggle of an impoverished and disenfranchised community. The night watchman is A) not getting paid enough to get shot B) by his neighbors that are just fighting for their own survival.
So what is wrong? What is wrong with the world today? What is wrong with this fucking fucked-up society? With these revised lyrics, Green Day and U2 certainly made the effort to remind people, even in the midst of a celebration of "rebirth, new birth," as Bono put it, that everything's not okay. Hurricane Katrina was a shitstorm on many levels, and we are still feeling the repercussions today.
Earlier, it was suggested that Jobson's great big "the saints are coming!" was meant optimistically. It's a powerful enough lyric that it stands on its own as a meaningful statement, even beside all the rest of the lyrics. But the fact is that the rest of the lyrics, both original and revised, are not so positive. And in light of lines such as "No matter how I try, I realize there's no reply," and "What's wrong now?" we have to ask ourselves if the saints really are coming, or if Jobson was just being ironic.
We've talked before about how a song has an original meaning, and also meanings that are created by listeners and other artists as the song goes out into the world and grows. And that's never been more true than in the case of "The Saints are Coming." The Skids gave it a meaning, as did their fans. Green Day and U2 gave it another meaning, as do Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, since it has been reconsidered in this context. And now it's our turn.
This time it's actually up to us. Will the meaning of that powerful statement, "the saints are coming," be about hope, and humanity, and heroes, or will it be a joke, a snide quip pointing to the fact that the saints are obviously not coming? How are we going to treat each other? Is the world going to get better or worse? What does the song mean? It's really up to us.
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