Song a Day: “Kiss Me” (Matt Slocum)

Welcome to the first installment of Song of the Day.  I present one song per class period in my songwriting course.  This is the song that I cover on the first day of class.

You may know Matt Slocum’s “Kiss Me” as being that hit song by Six Pence None the Richer.  Slocum, the band’s guitarist, released the song on the band’s 1997 self-titled album.  While the arrangement and production of the song are both notable (check out the inclusion of the melodica, and the use of filtered, musical echo on the song’s title lyric), we’ll be examining the song in relationship to the lyrics.

The song has only two verses and a chorus, but the lyrics are chock full of descriptive imagery:  “milky twilight,” “moonlight floor,” and “fireflies dance, silver moon’s sparkling.”  This imagery hits every sensory path:  sight, sound, smell, and touch.  It even hits a kinesthetic note with “swing me on its hanging tire.”

The song generally steers clear of rhyming, avoiding a potential sing-songy nature.  The verses use only remote rhymes.  The first verse uses a consonant rhyme with grass and dress (lines 2 & 4), while the second verse uses a family rhyme with hat and map (lines 3 & 4).  The only rhyme in the chorus is an internal one, “lift your open hand, strike up the band, and make the fireflies dance, silver moon’s sparkling.” Furthermore, dance could be considered an assonance rhyme with hand and band.

The strong imagery of the lyrics not only help establish an emotive quality to the song, but they also hint at details of the narrative.  The dress mentioned in the line, “you wear those shoes and I will wear that dress,” suggests a pulchritudinous garment that twirls in a satisfying manner when the protagonist dances.

Ultimately the song is about dancing as much as it is about kissing.  In chorus the singer commands, “lead me out on the moonlit floor.”  Furthermore, the following line, “lift your open hand,” directs the object of the singer’s affection to invite her to dance.

The second verse continues with somewhat cryptic imagery that is rich for interpretation. The verse starts out with a nostalgic note, “Kiss me, down by the broken tree house,” which simultaneous points to the remoteness of childhood while still evoking it.  This line in tandem with the following, “swing me upon its hanging tire,” suggests a playful aspect to the romance at hand.

The most cryptic line of the song is the last line of the verse, “we’ll take the trail marked on your father’s map.”  This line, like the trail it describes, could lead any number of places.  On face value, the couple could simply be going somewhere remote, like a place you’d need a map to get to, in order to canoodle (as the young folks say).

However, the fact that the song specifies that the map belongs to the father of the singer’s sweetheart has always struck me as interesting.  Here Slocum could have used any two-syllable possessive (brother’s, cousin’s, best friend’s, etc.), but he settled on father’s.  Invoking the father suggests a generational aspect that potentially places the trail into the world of metaphor.

In such an interpretation, the trail represents a life path, and the statement, “we’ll take the trail marked on your father’s map,” becomes, “we’ll do what your parents did . . . get married / have children.”  Set only three lines away from “the broken treehouse,” under such an interpretation, the romance presented in “Kiss Me” is more than a fun, sweet dalliance, it is an important milestone in life, namely falling in love (for a lifetime).

Suggestions of matrimony in pop music were much more common in the fifties, when they reassured listeners of noble intentions of teenage Romeos.  With the notable exception of “All the Single Ladies,” matrimony is a much less common subject of songs in recent years.

Slocum’s “Kiss Me” manages to do the unlikely.  It suggests a long term relationship (marriage) in the midst of a song that evokes imagery related to new romance in a manner that does not scare off, or moralize to the listener.  The song balances the physical delight, pleasure, and sweetness of young romance, while suggesting a love that may last a lifetime.