Let's start with 'Norweigian Wood'. This is pretty clearly a boy meets girl song, it starts with the fairly unambiguous line
It's the sixties, free love, it's pretty clear what's going on even if there is a bit of ambiguity about who made the first move.I once had a girl
Or should I say
She once had me
Then the chronology appears to move backwards.
And then we getShe showed me her room
Isn't it good?
What's that got to do with the price of fish? There's no reference to Scandanavia or forests anywhere. Maybe he's referring to pine furniture, but that seems doubtful. We're toldNorwegian wood
I suspect John was just short of a couple of iambs and stuck Norwegian Wood in.She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
But I looked around
And I noticed there wasn't a chair.
Anyway, back to the beginning of the song. It all now falls apart. They're sitting their, John on the rug, waiting ('biding my time', what for) and drinking wine then, in the middle of the night (2 o'clock), after a lot of chat, so they appear to have been getting on, she makes the move
. She seems a little apprehensive because she changes the subjectAnd the she said
"It's time for bed"
but, contrary to what we are told at the beginning of the song, John rejects her advancesShe told me she worked in the morning
And started to laugh
Nearly as baffling as the title. But that's it, John wakes up, she's gone and he light's a fire. May be he used Norwegian wood for that?I told her I didn't
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
And then there's that other 60s waltz, 'Delilah', you know it. But what does
mean? I know it sound dramatic, but what were they doing? Indonesian Shadow puppets? Watching blue movies projected on the curtains?I saw the flickering shadows of love on her blind
Oh I give up. I'll just stick with the tunes.