I've read Hullah's essay thoroughly. I think the full version it can be found at Shadow Cabinet. It definitely corresponds with my pet theory on Myrhh and Heyday in general. I've mentioned it before and certainly do not want to bore anyone, but I enjoy rambling on about it more than any other lyrical subject matter generated by SK.

SK has acknowledged his debt to surrealism in the Sum of the Parts interview. Clearly, his lyrics reflect the surrealist principle of accepting the preeminence of the unconscious mind in human life. I've read more than once that he does not labor over lyrics too intensely, dashing them off over the course of afternoons in some cases. If this true, not only is he immensely gifted, but much of what he writes is "un-edited". It is essentially primary process material, or what the typical Freudian Psychoanalyst coaxes from the patient in the form of free association. This primary process material is considered essential thinking, as pure a representation of the unconscious mind as we can attain. Now wonder SKs work is so ripe with archetypal imagery (e.g. Traveling Magi, dead suns, deserts, mythical figures, reptiles, great machines, wombs, doomed cites, etc.).

I think the lyrics resonate with us because these are images that we maintain in the archives of our own minds. As SK is quoted as saying in the Hullahs essay, "I try to set up lyrical situations where people start using their own imaginations as sort of a diving board.The words are vague and opaque and they are a quick amalgamation of people, places and events. They are about things that could have happened but did not, and things that did happen but could not have.loose threads of myth, legend, dream, non-sequitur, science fiction, automatic writing and the occasional punctuation error.

Much of what SK writes works on a variety of levels because it is non-specific. Concerning Heyday, he states, "Gradually, in my mind, a theme for the album developed: at first nebulous concept - fame, success, the aftermath and the decline, not just on the small and narrow level of a "pop group" (though that too). But in any and all broader contexts imaginable, hoping to explore this concept with some kind of backwards/forwards hindsight starting with "myrrh" (an old gift for a new god) and ending with "roman" (an endless historical feedback loop). I just seemed natural to call this album Heyday."

In any and all broader contexts imaginable. Essentially, we are encouraged to listen and revel in our own unconscious, where the constructs of time and logic fall away. Consequently, I have concluded that Heyday is, for me, a dramatic narrative on perceptual decontextualization. A foray through temporal and physical dimensions existing in relationship to each other like books stacked haphazardly on a shelf, in which one is suddenly incorporated into an alien experience, with a completely baffling effect, where things that could of happened did not, and things that did happen could not have. Consider the lyrics.

Oh Lord we are threatened again
In the slipstream pull of the federal men
Plummet in some seamless night
Down here to earth it's hopeless then

Apache gunman in the boiling crowd
Who never got to meet you last time
We're interrupted by the telephone
You didn't think they were invented then

A gunfight in Dodge City, a murder in Bombay

It's already yesterday, we're off the calendar

I start the car for Violet Town
And then to Babylon, over the border

God I've been asleep so long, I've been away
Back from software limbo the natives call today

I turned up in some harsh doomed city on another plane

They say that character you play is rising fast
So you get drunk, make a half second jump
And experience it as the past

Dishwater cafe in a torn paper street
A rundown future let me down now everything's complete

She tells my story back to me she said I'll live this chapter till eternity

They took away his language, then his memory
He said "I'm never, never coming back again"

Im sure there are more productive things to do with my time, but Heyday is just so damn fascinating. I realize this thread is about Myrrh, but Heyday, for me, reads like a single complete song.