In honour of The Tragically Hip’s latest album, We Are The Same, released April 7th, here’s a brief series that demonstrates the manner in which I expect my students to approach poetry — without any research, and without any input from those who may know Gord Downie’s purposes for each song. I will analyse and speculate on each song’s possible meanings. For me, the poetry of TTH’s music is great literature; among the best.
Track #4: Coffee Girl
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Title
- just having recently seen Peter Donaldson‘s speech in the first act of David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross, I must admit I thought the title may be a racial comment regarding the protagonist’s skin tone
- more likely, however, the protagonist works at Tim Hortons and is miserable
Interesting Words
- “Beautiful and disaffected”
- “The Hardscape or your shoes”
Images
- “Get to the back door / Look around then turn the key” — is she nervously looking around because she’s afraid of being attacked or because she’s up to something mischievous? Or, is she casually taking her time, reluctant to begin her shift?
Literary Devices
- alliteration and personification: “Hangover hanging on by the fangs / Walk to work on wild feet”
- repetition (repeating a word in the line following): “hard to leave your bed” and “hard summer sheets”; “to work” and “to the back door”; “turn on all the lights” and “turn the key”..
Connections
- one moment the emphasis on the beat places the song in a dance club, and the next moment I feel that I’m listening to Acker Bilk
- the repeated line “Hey there Coffee Girl” seems either like a casual and friendly greeting, or like a customer calling for a refill in an arrogant or degrading manner.
- Ol Cat Power and Classic Beck — Cat Stevens? and Beck?
- “Taking cannons to fools / When all you need’s a BB gun” — though this is similar to a line from Downie’s book Coke Machine Glow (cannon to a pea-shooter fight), I can’t follow the placement of it here.
Favourite Quote
The Hardscape or your shoes
When the moon’s behind the hill
Possible Paraphrase
“I know that it can be hard to get up in the morning and get to work. I see you in the coffee shop on your shift, drowning your sorrows in that old music you’re playing: Cat Stevens, Beck, and Beware Purveyors of Cool. I know that you’re having a hard time lately and that it’s been particularly bad since you started seeing this guy. And, he’s not going to leave you alone.”
SUMMARY
Though several of my peers have listed this track as their favourite on the album, it hasn’t grabbed me yet. Perhaps the speaker in this song is singing about his Ex, not wanting to believe that his relationship with her is over and refusing to accept that she’s with another (“It’s hard to leave your bed” and “It was perfect til / He came along and wrecked it”). Or, perhaps the speaker is simply describing a day in the life of the protagonist — a girl going through the motions of life, work, and love.
FYI–It’s not Cat Stevens, it’s the singer “Cat Power” that he’s referring to.
and “The Hardscape or your shoes”, to me, means to stay or go, he’ll make you choose between staying or leaving. Hardscape is the surface and that remains where it is, while shoes will take you away.
Reading your post jolted me out of an assumption I’d made about this song. I’d assumed that the narrator was the one doing that actions (“walk to work on wild feet… turn the key… take down the chairs and make things neat”), but your perspective made me realize that the narrator never says “I” in relation to those things.
The song makes more sense, I think, from the standpoint you’ve presented: the Coffee Girl is the one experiencing the actions, and the narrator is describing them.
It’s interesting that, of the love triangle presented in the song (between Coffee Girl, the narrator, and the one who will “make you choose”), Coffee Girl is the only one who gets any development. The other two characters are really just tangential to her experience – even though she will ultimately need to choose between them.
One of the things I’ve always liked about the Hip is that they rarely (if ever) sing the stereotypical love song. It seems that this album has a lot more songs devoted to the idea of love. Or, perhaps, all Hip songs are about love, just on different levels?
@Steve, I wasn’t familiar with Cat Power until you pointed that out. Thanks for sharing that!
Steve and Siege, Thanks a lot for stopping by and discussing Tragically Hip lyrics and for pointing out the proper reference for ‘Cat Power’.
Steve, I also really like your thoughts on ‘hardscape or your shoes’.
And Siege, you’re right — perhaps Hip songs are about love, just on different levels. … Thankfully! We certainly don’t need another band on the airwaves singing ‘baby I love your way’! Maybe The Hip, with their new album title, really is trying to tell us that they’re “the same” as other bands.