All the years combine
They melt into a dream
** a man looks back at his life, and it's like remembering a day dream, like it was all just one fevered memory, one gigantic thought that's hardly real at all.
A broken angel sings
From a guitar
** a lament pours from a guitar, sadly, softly, like an angel that is malfunctioning like a broken machine, or perhaps with a broken spirit. Is it the singer of this song?
In the end there's just a song
** The idea that everything leads up to a moment, in this instance, just this idea of a sad song of regret and nostalgic lamentation.
Comes crying like the night (wind)
**Uncontrollable, irresistible, quietly, all encompassing
Through all the broken dreams
And vanished years
** A bit more discussion of regrets and dreams that didn't come to fruit as the reward of all the years gone by like hourglass sand
Stella Blue
**Not sure myself. John Galt?
When all the cards are down
There's nothing left to see
** In the face of the inevitable, when your cards have been played and a losing hand is all that's to be played (the inevitable end), there is an exhausted completion. Perhaps you've seen it all, but now there is no escape. It's over.
There's just the pavement left
**A symbol for the uncaring frame as an unmovable, uncaring fact of life.
And broken dreams
**Self explanatory
In the end there's still that song
Comes crying like the wind
Down every lonely street
That's ever been
**Even in the face of ultimate defeat, there is still the bittersweet song, the musical poetry of life, the blue, dark music of the spheres that is your tear stained life
Stella Blue
I've stayed in every blue-light cheap hotel
**Where affairs, men on the run, drug deals, and long trips happen.
Can't win for trying
** Again, defeat, defeat,defeat
Dust off those rusty strings just
One more time
Gonna make em shine
**in the face of all of this, a choice is made to recapture the beauty of what's left in a reclamation of dreams that were given up on over a lifetime, to pick up their life again and make it a beautiful expression, like a Phoenix from the ashes, a reclamation of dreams abandoned and celebration of a darkening sky, a life not quite over yet
It all rolls into one
And nothing comes for free
** The facts of life are there, odds are there to beat, like Cohen says.
There's nothing you can hold
For very long
**Everything, everyone in your life isn't just on their way out of your life in loss (this too shall pass, all love rife with the prick of inevitable loss) but also that they are going through it also.
And when you hear that song
Come crying like the wind
It seems like all this life
Was just a dream
Stella Blue
**A recapsulation of the entire trip.