Baby’s On Fire | A Year of Songs

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Mythic super-anti-heroine alert. Yep, it’s yet another Baby song.

Like Prometheus, half-man and half-god, chained to his rock and feasted on by birds of prey day after day only to be magically restored the next, ready to be tortured and maimed again… forever (for the crime of sneaking the gift of fire to Man… those “full” gods could be downright mean), the increasingly mythic Baby, child-woman, goddess-whore, seems doomed to appear endlessly in my songs.

Who is Baby? I asked in an earlier post.

I suggested that, while there were undoubtedly aspects of old girlfriends and love interests, Baby also probably represented a willful, destructive part of myself, as well.

I also noted that when I had just started playing guitar and writing songs as a 20 year old failed academic poet I swore I’d never use the word “baby” in a song unless I was referring to an infant. The Brian Eno song, “Baby’s On Fire,” however, opened up my mind and gave me new license to rise above pretense and embrace pop music as an idiom. Yo.

Anyhow, moving right along, we don’t really know much about Baby — at this point — except that she is apparently in the permanent past tense. A song not yet on AYoS, “When Baby Can’t Go On” seems to suggest that she may have written her own coda, perhaps by taking one final moonlight swim. (Not to be confused with the also upcoming “Swim or Die.”)

The nice thing about writing her out by swimming her out to sea is that it has an open-ended lack of finality… what I like to think of as a disturbing lack of closure.

Because Baby is not at peace and she never will be… she’s a restless, hungry soul, doomed to move through my songs, bringing lust, longing, and ultimate sorrow to our hapless hero again and again.

You’d think the poor sap would learn.