Sleep Token’s “Take Me Back To Eden” and the five stages of grief
So I have had an idea for a possible interpretation for the album Take Me Back To Eden and as far as I have seen an interpretation with this idea has only been provided for Sundowning so far so I figured I’d give it a try.
Essentially what I’m seeing as a possible interpretation is Take Me Back To Eden expressing the five stages of grief after a suicide of a loved one, in particular a romantic partner. How I came to this idea? Let’s have a look.
TW: we will deal with the topics death, suicide and grief here.
Why would a song about death and grieving begin with two songs that sound more like an offering (see what I did there) to a lover rather than a sad song?
I think there are two reasons why the album starts with these songs. One of them is the stage of denial. When grieving, many people either feel numb or ever carry on like nothing ever happened in an attempt to ignore the issue. Both Chokehold and The Summoning can be seen as attempts to write about a passed loved one like nothing ever happened.
However I believe there is another reason. Throughout the album we watch the speaker go through a variety of emotions caused by the loss of a loved one. By starting the album with Chokehold and The Summoning, we are to understand how intense the relationship between the speaker and their lover was so we can empathise better with the emotions displayed in the course of the album.
Moving on to the second stage, anger, which is dealt with in Granite.
Now if you’ve wondered why I think the album might be about grieving after a suicide specifically, the explanation for this is mainly found in songs expressing anger. We will get back to this when talking about anger within the stage of depression but we can find some references in Granite already. It appears that the speaker is mad at their lover for not expressing their feelings before their death. Specifically “we’d rather be six feet under than be lonely” suggests that the loved one has not expressed their negative feelings out of fear the speaker might leave them. A similar theme is dealt with in the line “You say you want me but you know I’m not what you need”.
See, with Aqua Regia and Vore it gets a little bit tough and I definitely find it hard to find lines actually referring to this state but we’ll work with it.
I think Aqua Regia could be understood as the speaker offering to go through the same pain as their loved one in an attempt to get them back, kind of like “come back, I’ll be in pain with you”.
Vore goes in a similar direction, the speaker is trying to make themselves relatable (“Are you in pain like I am”), hoping that this might bring their loved one back.
Again this is very brief (and analysing Aqua Regia has always given me a headache) so I will keep it at this.
We enter the fourth stage, depression. This is by far the longest stage with five whole songs, which quite naturally shows how grief isn’t linear.
Ascensionism is a whole emotional ride on it’s own and can almost be seen as a trip through different stages within the grieving process.
I would still consider this to be part of the depressive stage. “Anything’s better than the way I feel right now” definitely suggest this.
Lines like “you make me wish I could disappear” might feel a little out of place here as they seem to be directed at a person who has hurt the speaker, however I believe the line is to be understood as “by disappearing out of my life, you make me wish I could disappear”.
Though as mentioned before, Ascensionism is a whole ride on its own and I will definitely write an interpretation on this song alone at some point.
Next we have Are You Really Okay?, definitely one of the main reasons that led me to this interpretation in the first place.
Here we have the speaker clearly expressing desperation and helplessness (“I want to help you but I don’t know how”) and we are confronted with the speaker being well aware of their lover’s mental struggles way before their death. The lyrics of this song are also the main reason I believe the album is dealing with grief after a suicide specifically since here we have a bunch of references to mental health struggles.
Now for The Apparition and DYWTYLM we can see an interesting shift in the feelings. If we stick to the 5 stages of grief we would still be in the stage of depression, however we can see the speaker circling back to anger.
It’s important to know that the stages of grief are to be understood as a “guideline” to what grief can look like when we observe people dealing with illness or loss, yet they do not necessarily have to appear in this exact order, grief is rarely linear.
Additionally we need to understand that a less commonly known symptom of depression is anger, so the anger expressed by the speaker can be understood as a symptom of the depressive state rather than a separate stage.
The Apparition seems to deal with the speaker (day-)dreaming about their loved one, however they keep circling back to reality and realise that those dreams are only based on memories and events that no longer can happen in the present.
Examples for this would be lines like “Why are you never real”, “But I know you will disappear just as I awake” or “Loaded dreams still leave me empty”.
What we can see here quite well is a combination of depression and anger. The speaker is angry with their passed loved one, they basically yell at them to finally leave their thoughts and stop haunting their dreams. At the same time they express the depression and feeling of emptiness that those dreams leave them with.
Now DYWTYLM continues the theme of depression in combination with anger while switching the topic. The speaker now asks for answers on questions that potentially deal with the suicide of their loved one. Simultaneously the speaker understands the death as an offense against themselves, they assume that their loved one has expressed a lack of love for the speaker by ending their own life.
Two things are important here. One, this does not mean that the speaker is self centred, it does not even mean they genuinely hold this belief. Looking for the “bad guy” is a very natural process in grieving, essentially the brain is trying to provide answers to questions that cannot actually be answered. Two, while the song is titled DYWTYLM and therefore the focus is easily on the emotion of anger, I don’t believe this is the actual focus here. Rather than that we can look at all the questions in the verses like “Do you pull at the chains? Or do you push into constant aching?” or “Is there something you give? That you will never receive in return?” While the anger in lines like “maybe not that you conceal your feelings, they just don’t exist” cannot and should not be ignored, I believe the main theme here is the speaker making an attempt at understanding the emotions that eventually caused the death. Furthermore the speaker briefly expresses their own sadness specifically in the line “my reflection just won’t smile back at me like I know it should”.
Lastly for the fourth stage we have Rain.
I put this under the stage of depression but I do think there is a good reason this is the last song in this stage.
The speaker is looking back on their love “the vicious cycle was over the moment you smiled at me” but we are still slowly fading into the stage of acceptance.
The last line in the bridge “When I open my eyes to the future I can hear you say my name” could be seen as an expression for the very common phrase “they would want you to move on”.
When the speaker thinks about the future, he imagines his lover guiding them a way into said future.
We now enter the stage of acceptance with the last two songs and I believe acceptance refers to two different things in this case, accepting one’s own feelings and finally the actual death.
In Take Me Back To Eden, the speaker mostly attempts at validating their own feelings. In the first verse, they let themselves indulge in memories of the past, in the second verse they express how they have been experiencing the journey of grieving.
One line I want to talk about in particular can be found in the third verse.
“That we’ve no idea what we’ve got until we lose it and no amount of love will keep it around if we don’t choose it.”
I think this is such a powerful way to express both the fear of not having appreciated the significant other while they were alive and the realisation that the speaker themselves can’t be blamed, the death of their loved one was not to be prevented by the speaker just loving their partner more.
Last but not least, let’s move over to Euclid.
We have to understand the death of a loved one does not mean one has moved on entirely. One can simultaneously accept while still being desperate, sad or helpless.
“Give me five whole minutes” may refer to the feeling of wanting to relive the time experienced with the person just a little bit longer. Generally the first verse refers to this exact feeling, getting lost in one’s memories and wanting back the old times just a little longer. If we think about lines like “Give me one last ride on a sunset sky lane”, we can see the speaker almost begging their lost love to come back for just a little bit. This could also be connected to a very common feeling in the process of grief, where one wants to go back to times with the loved one to experience the moments together more consciously.
“Call me when you get the chance, I can feel the walls around me closing in” appears to be the speaker wanting to talk to the loved person they lost while already being aware they won’t actually receive in an answer.
The second verse continues the theme of wanting back the loved one, however the speaker expresses the awareness that they are gone.
“I play along with the life signs anyway” seems to describe the process of slowly getting back into one’s daily life while slowly moving on from actively grieving.
Now as I already mentioned, moving back into your daily life and moving on, does not mean you entirely forget about the person.
“Yet in reverse, you are all my symmetry, a parallel I would lay my life on” can be understood as an attempt to express that the speaker does not want to forget about the person they lost, maybe they have learned a lot of valuable life lessons from that person and want to remember those things in their future life.
“Call me when you have the time, I just need to leave this part of me behind” basically concludes this feeling that has been building up over the second verse, the speaker clearly expresses that they feel the need to move on with their life.
Now for the sake of interpretation we are not going to look into the last verse being a reference to TNDNBTG and just look at lyrics on their own.
The first part of the lyrics once more shows the speaker reminiscing as in the line “We tangle endlessly, like lovers entwined”.
Now let’s have a look the last few lines.
“I know for the last time, you will not be mine, so give me the night.”
The speaker seems to reflect on their own process of grieving while also coming to terms with the fact that their loved one has passed away. They know they cannot be together like they used to be and are ready to go on with their life. “Give me the night” can be understood as an expression that the speaker is ready for new challenges, memories and experiences.
I obviously don’t know if this is the meaning intended by Vessel (if you ask my literature professor the meaning intended by the author doesn’t have to concern me either way).
However I think that it deepens the understand of songs like Are You Really Okay or Euclid and provides a rather new perspective on songs like DYWTYLM.
