The Kraken

The beauty and uniqueness of music is incredible. It’s fascinating how many people in the world, experiencing different life events, could be listening to a single song and finding it fits with their own unique situation. This for me is what I find most interesting about music. I love how my interpretation of a song can change depending on my mood, thoughts and feelings. I have taken different meanings from different songs over the years and I have been able to find solace from these lyrics and the music. This has never been truer when listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” and, later with The Travelling Wilburys, ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’.

I find music, like poetry, is open to interpretation. The analysis of my music will be different from person to person depending on their own life experiences. For me, Fleetwood Mac songs, such as Landslide, Silver Springs, and Songbird, have evoked a range of different thoughts and images in my mind depending on where I have been in my own life at the time of listening. I attempt to tell my own stories through my lyrics, but I know these lyrics will take on different meanings dependent on the person listening. I think that ‘The Kraken’ is a song which can take on a story of its own.

‘The Kraken’ is a failed love story between a peasant man and a rich lady. The massive disparity of wealth in their lives means that they are not allowed to be together – ‘status isn’t new and then you had to go’. The man decides to join a sea-ship expedition to find wealth, whether it be from piracy or claiming a large chest of treasure from an old map ‘Goonies style’ is not known. The plan is to get wealthy very quickly to be deemed worthy and fit to marry the lady he has fallen in love with. The Kraken enters at this stage to put an end to the man’s mission and prevent him ever seeing his love again. Now a Kraken, immortalised by Clash of the Titans (the original one folks) and, later, Pirates of the Carribean, is a ‘mythical’ sea creature which is essentially a big, giant, massive octopus. I suppose there is a hint of Moby Dick in the story that I tell only the giant whale is replaced by the Kraken. The Kraken whose ‘arms breach through the hull, arms that never wave’.

In my own mind I like to think that the lady’s father, not mentioned to in the story, is Davey Jones and he has released the Kraken in order to get rid of this peasant who is not worthy of his daughter…and then he sends him to the fuckin’ locker!!

D.M.