my love is a lighthouse
okay, finally, i remembered to do this and we have a few cycles “to spare” to answer this one.
obviously, disclaimer about not really knowing the context at all and my breakdown of this is tinted by our own experience and other media that uses the same metaphor for corollary and even competing reasons. in fact, this time i think i might lean heavily on this because we still have an attachment to lighthouses as a symbol.
first, i feel very compelled to point out that this song feels pretty standard fare. this is for an in-universe musical, as you said, so kind of to be expected. it reminds me of It’s Over, Isn’t It in its structure and you’d probably know better than us why that is.
now, for the song’s writing, it feels like it is alluding painfully heavily to a parent reassuring their child about, well, “leaving the nest”. essentially encouraging them to put to sleep their worries and dream in whatever direction it feels they want to. the reassurance there is that they will have a place to come home to. it is an anchoring presence. “i will weather each storm standing by till safe you return from the night” pretty cleanly encapsulates this. on some level, it reminds me a lot of Train’s Drops of Jupiter, which tackles the notion of return and presence from the perspective of “tell me what you found out there.”
this, of course, is kind of the crux of it. the singer, by virtue of doing this act, is making a particular kind of sacrifice. you can not merely operate a lighthouse and not expect it to occupy fractions of your time as though it is pedestrian. she even notes this: “let me sing you to sleep / […] / i will wait at the shore for you / i will weather each storm standing by till-“ i do this for you. i wait for you. that is- i appoint myself your levy, your anchor, your north star from any distance and my task is to assure you a place to come back to, in any listlessness and ennui.
obviously, we eat that fucking shit up. heavily, HEAVILY reminds us of cavetown’s Smoke Signals and more minorly The Script’s If You Ever Come Back, [with] the former more broadly addressing the grief of allowing someone to go and the latter, the sacrifice entailed by making that choice.
however, here’s the thing about the lighthouse metaphor. a lighthouse on its own does not gesture at being a home. in fact, plenty of lighthouses live isolated or at least a good distance away from main ports. the thing about lighthouses is they can be homes, but they are also usually purposive. you live in a lighthouse because that’s your job.
people make good use of the light. people seek you out, of course, but they are largely not there for the you running the lighthouse, the home you can offer. people reach the shore and they do what it is they do with their lives, perhaps thankful for the guidance but largely forgetting of the lighthouse. we hold so much grief to these notions- that lighthouses are lonely places, shining in consistency but assured removal (To The Moon), and that lighthouses are misunderstood, elevated gestures of human kindness removing a person from the world they live (The Memory Palace: Ida Lewis). it leaves me listening to the song with a certain kind of irrevocable melancholy.
it feels especially to be there because it feels like the music implies just one more line at the very end after “the light”. i have no clue why or what it is, genuinely, but the song feels like it is leaving something so tense and hung in the air, even if the music of it “resolves” fine. i feel so uneasy even if it is meant to comfort.
and yeah. i just. this song really scratches a strong itch for this metaphor. lighthouses sit at this intersection of being necessary and implicitly self-sacrificing, but a laborious task now made obsolete. it isolates, while ironically being a tool to bring someone closer to home. it perches someone atop a pedestal, perhaps even necessarily so, in order to grant the light it serves, but simultaneously dehumanizes them, turns them into an implicit “something” to rely on. so fucking good. truly so vayne.