Pork Soda - Glass Animals

pork soda is a monologue, telling the story of someone who has fallen out of love with someone that used to be their ‘ride or die’.

Growing old or growing apart- whatever name is cast onto it, everyone human will experience feeling that the river of life pulling them apart from someone they were once in the same lifeboat with. We are all born into the river, we all decide whether we sink or swim, but sometimes the river makes decisions for us, pulling us apart from one another.

Verse one:

“Somewhere in South End when you were fun”

Starts out in the ‘south end’, which pulls up the setting of a city, a place of the past. Then the narrator leads us in, slightly scorning their lover, implying that they’re no longer fun, they’re lacking something.

“You took my hand and you made me run”

The lover took his hand and made him run, made decision after decision for him, cementing a certain power imbalance between the two lovers.

“up past the prison to the seafront… “

They rose above (or moved past, whichever interpretation suits you) the prison, leading us to believe that they’re headed towards freedom. To the seafront: waves crash, sand infiltrates, land meets its end and gives way to the ocean.

“You climbed the cliff edge and took the plunge”

Although it has previously been established that the lover is dragging the narrator everywhere she pleases, this line only mentions the lover, and puts distance between the two. She climbs up, plunges down, and does it alone.

Verse two (chorus)

The second verse opens up the story line, and now the narrator seems to be speaking directly to the lover:

“Why can't we laugh now like we did then? How come I see you and ache instead? How come you only look pleased in bed? Let's climb the cliff edge and jump again”

The first question asked is a rhetorical one, for there is no answer to that question. Why is not a helpful question and there will be no helpful answers.

The second question is asked of himself, asked about his own reactions.

The third question is circling back to the lover, asking and wanting an answer. How come you only look pleased in bed? Tell me.

The fourth line of the chorus brings us back to the first verse: illustrating a cliff. This time though, the lover is not jumping alone. With this last line the narrator admits that he wants his love back, and he’ll pursue it to no ends- even if it means jumping off a cliff.

The sub-chorus is the repetition of two lines:

“Pineapples are in my head” and “Got nobody cause I’m brain-dead”

The writer of this song actually says in an interview that the line “pineapples are in my head” is simply something he heard a passerby say as he was walking down the street. However, simplicity is rarely found in between the lines, so I’d like to take it one layer further. Pineapples are often eaten along with LSD in order to heighten the psychoactive effects, and overuse of drugs can induce a brain-dead state.

“Somebody said that I'm a fuckin' slum, Don't know that I belong, Maybe you're fucking dumb, Maybe I'm just a bum, Maybe you're fucking scum, Don't you go psycho chum”

This verse is an aggressive interjection, interrupting the consistent tone of longing despair that the song has been sung through so far. The verse starts out with a critique (to put it nicely) from a random figure, immediately attacking the narrator. Subsequently, the narrator throws this offense back at his lover. Maybe he does this because he feels most comfortable throwing stones at his own house. Maybe because he knows that his lover is too absent to even be affected by the verbal stones. The end of this interjection is a drastic change from the verbal attack one line previous:

“I want you for the world, I want you all the time”

Now he is back to begging for his lover to return, yet still tinged with aggression and resentment.

Third Verse:

Here, the narrator fondly looks back at a time when he and his lover were at peace with each other, and truly in love. He details “5000 footsteps in your wet dress”, hinting at the long walk back from the deep plunge. He continues the recollection:

“Back to the house with your arms around my neck, we drank pork soda with tangled legs, I won't forget how you looked at me then”

One interpretation of this is that he carried her on his back (with your arms around my neck) back to the house, drank pork soda entangled in each other’s arms (and legs) and of course: he won’t forget how she looked at him then. Another interpretation of this is that she did the long (5,000 step) walk back to their house, foreshadowing her own journey without him, and though she jumped and embraced him upon her arrival (your arms around my neck) she was the only one embracing. they drank the pork soda with their legs tangled, and she looked at him in a way so outstanding that the memory of it never fades.

Verse four:

“I know I'm no sweet prince of love, those times that we got drunk… Maybe Jamaica rum, Maybe some Johnny Dub, Maybe you still think of us…”

The song jumps out of the story-telling narration and reverts back to the narrator going in mental circles with himself. He is edging upon the cold truth of reality, that the best times with his lover were not due to being the “prince of love”, instead they’re a result of drinking too much pork soda… But maybe she still thinks of what they once were, right? Maybe she misses his love as much as he does of her. Maybe, maybe.

The verse finishes with these three lines:

“Phone buzz, and still I jump. Why don't I say it then? I want you all the time”

The phone buzzes and he still jumps at the hope that maybe it’s his lover, maybe she’s calling him, maybe she’s thinking of him. He asks himself “why don’t I say it then?” Say what? That he wants her all the time.

The chorus repeats and so does the “why don’t we laugh now, like we did then” line.

The song closes out.

The music to this song is intense and perfectly echoes the feelings behind the story of pork soda. Sometimes I’ll catch myself losing someone and instantly spiral. I’ll think about the past and I’ll overanalyze it to the point of warping everything I previously knew. I’ll make everything a metaphor and give it all a subliminal message, I’ll fight against the river that’s pulling me and this other person apart until I realize that I am, in fact, spiraling and I need to stop. That realization is a hard shock, a shock that mirrors the reaction anyone has the first time they drink pork soda.

Moral of the story? Have pork soda on hand, but don’t drink it all the time. Don’t fight against a river, you’ll end up drowning. But really, look both ways before you cross the street, and don’t try to pull a moral out of anything other than a fable.