http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7lxXM-gVq0

The meth addict in “All Up the Seething Coast” doesn’t resist help, but wants you to know it’ll do no good.

Track: “All Up the Seething Coast”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

On an album like We Shall All Be Healed, where every song is about meth addiction, a song like “All Up the Seething Coast” is clearly necessary. You have your “Quito” and your “Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of” that represent the glory of getting through it all and you have your “The Young Thousands” and your “Home Again Garden Grove” that challenge that idea and suggest that you might not get through it in the first place. If those are the two options, songs like “Mole” and “All Up the Seething Coast” follow the journey across the line from A to B. “Mole” is an ending (“Against Pollution” is another, from a different perspective) but “All Up the Seething Coast” is the album’s middle.

The addict in “All Up the Seething Coast” isn’t making a judgement about addiction, they’re just laying down the facts of their life. They say “and nothing you can say or do will stop me // and a thousand dead friends can’t stop me” not to ask this other person in his life to stop, but just to express the futility of it all. Spend your energy how it works for you, Samaritan, but understand that legions have died for the cause and I’m still here in this apartment with what I need.

It’s not the kind of song that gets played live and it’s fairly clear in its message, so it doesn’t get much dissection in the normal places. The most anyone ever comments on is the “sugar” metaphor. Meth apparently totally undoes your appetite, but you still crave sweetness. They may “show up for dinner when you tell me to” but they’re going to live by their rules: lots and lots of what they need and nothing else.