Definition
here, lyrics to
wbf here. Of course, you could sum up the title of
Way Before The Flood by saying
pre-deluge, but Black Eyed Sceva wanted to appeal to the common man as well.
A funny thing about this song (
wbf) is that I never heard them play it live. A friend of mine (that's you, Joe Honzik) got a job working with 5 Minute Walk right out of college in May 1996. His first assignment given to him by Frank Tate was to go on the road with
Sceva for a week or 10 days or something (can't remember). Rough life! Anyway, Joe told me that Brad or someone would always put
wbf on the set list for the show and Jeremy would always take it off or cross it out or whatever. I don't know what that means...whether he didn't like the song anymore, didn't think it was good enough, thought the analogies didn't work, whatever...if you've heard it live, consider yourself in the lucky few!
I personally love the way the words are sung in this title-track, especially "not manufactured." Jeremy sings "the light we walk in is NOT MAN" (pause) "Ufactured..by us." The first few times I heard it I thought it was great to say the first part becuase I assumed it was saying not man-made...it's made by God..etc etc. And the last part of the line always caught me off guard. Not many people do that unless they are trying to be funny. But, as you hear with all their songs, whatever is done musically or vocally just works. It works! It was meant to be that way.
This song and its vocal arrangment also makes you forget that the words don't rhyme. A few do at the ends of verses, but for the most part they are ideas broken up by vocal inflection. The way the music and vocals are arranged make you see past your normal expectation of "rain" rhyming with "pain" or when the end of a line is. If you're reading along with the lyrics, you don't know when it's going to stop or start again (unless you've heard it a million times). But it doesn't sound like a mistake or immature songwriting. It sounds exactly as it's supposed to. Now, after I realized this I went back and listened to all the songs and found that they all kind of go this way. There's nothing 100% conventional on these albums.
It's also why I think the lyrics inside the album are printed the way they are. No punctuation, no line breaks, no cue as to what is verse/chorus/bridge. They're just a paragraph. A stream of consciousness. Read together the words are little stories in and of themselves.
The verses are split into "way before the flood," "just before the flood," and "in the flood." Stages of life, perhaps? This song is still a little tough for me to figure out (post your theories in the comments) but a few parts that stick out: "
i heard the congregation roar" - someone once wrote to me that they likened this to the animals on the ark...that seemed like a neat idea to me ; "
if God has called you to be a missionary don't stoop to be a king" - I think Jeremy said in an interview that this is something his pastor had said...that to serve Christ as He commanded is the greatest thing ever and even the "top job" in the world's eyes is nothing compared to dying to self, loving God, and loving others ; "
why build that ark when you can't see over your own bow" - in conjunction with the next phrase it really hits home the idea of stepping out on faith...Noah built this thing that no one had ever seen because God told him it was going to rain (something else no one had ever seen)...and that was enough...even after 40 days of rain if God says it, that should be enough, even though we can't see the future or beyond our own nose.
I've rambled...I'm done.
