Peter Gabriel - My Body is a Cage

Listening to Washington's Bitter Earth reminded me of Peter Gabriel amazing orchestral cover of Arcade Fire's 'My body is a cage".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve4i4iy-ag

Both songs are longing voices backed by sparse but orchestral strings.

Dinah Washington mourns "this bitter earth that can be so cold", Gabriel finds himself "living in an age that calls darkness light".

Washington sings that "if my life is like the dust that hides the glow of a rose, what good am I?", Peter echoes that his "body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love."

Dinah hopes that someone will hear her because "while a voice within me cries, I'm sure someone may answer my call", conversely Gabriel is puzzled that he is "living in an age that screams my name at night, but when I get to the doorway there's no one in sight"

Both songs end in the hope that human companionship may ease the burden of existence - but the true heart of each song is the absence of that very thing. These are songs of souls longing for contact in our fallen material world of dust and bodily cages.

I could trace the origins of this notion from the Gnostics and Ecclesiastes to Macbeth and Camus, I have written papers on the potential pitfall of this type of philosophy - but none of that matters. When that longing is sung, I feel it and know it to be true.