Song Meaning
The lyrics paint a surreal, dreamlike landscape where time warps and reality shifts. The opening line immediately establishes a sense of altered perception, comparing the "velocity of time" to "sugar water" – a sweet, viscous, and perhaps diluted or softened experience of its passage. This sets a tone of gentle disorientation, where the narrator is adrift on a "concrete wave," a jarring image that grounds the abstract in a harsh, urban reality, yet the wind carries the scent of distant, tropical "sands of the southern island."
The core of the song seems to reside in a recurring, almost mystical motif: "A woman in the moon is singing to the earth." This image, repeated twice, suggests a celestial, feminine presence offering a song or message to the grounded world. It’s juxtaposed with the superstition of a "black cat crosses my path," hinting at a blend of mundane omens and profound, otherworldly communication. The repeated "La La La" sections further enhance this feeling of an ethereal, wordless melody or a simple, almost childlike chant, underscoring the dreamlike state.
The imagery then morphs into a more fantastical journey. The narrator rides a "camel that has big eyes," a creature of desert fantasy, and the urban "buildings are changing into coconut trees." This gradual transformation, "little by little," signifies a complete immersion into this altered state, moving from a concrete reality to a tropical, dreamlike paradise. The ultimate image of taking a "sugar water shower" brings the initial metaphor full circle, suggesting a cleansing or immersion in this sweet, altered perception of time and reality, a complete surrender to the surreal.
This lyrical tapestry is effective because it masterfully blends the concrete with the abstract, the mundane with the mystical. The specific, sensory details like the wind's direction and the smell of sand ground the listener even as the narrative drifts into the fantastical. The repetition of the moon-singing woman and the "La La La" creates a hypnotic effect, drawing the listener into the narrator's subjective experience. The transformation of the landscape and the final "sugar water shower" offer a sense of resolution, not necessarily to a problem, but to the state of being – a sweet, syrupy immersion in a world unbound by conventional time and space.