Song Meaning
Devendra Banhart's "Legless Love" is less a conventional song and more a surrealist poem set to music. The title itself hints at a love that's been crippled, perhaps emotionally or existentially, rendered immobile. The opening lines, with their paradoxical imagery of "webless love and fragrant mud," suggest a relationship steeped in contradictions – something both grounded and ethereal, lacking the necessary structure yet strangely appealing. Banhart isn't painting a portrait of simple affection; he's delving into the messy, often illogical terrain of human connection. The beauty is in the contradictions, the push and pull. He's acknowledging something broken, but still breathing. 
The imagery escalates into something darker and more unsettling as the song progresses. The act of burying "your hair in a bed of swords" and "your legs in a knife less snake" isn't literal violence, but a symbolic dismemberment. He's dissecting the relationship, burying parts of it in increasingly bizarre and dangerous places. The "knife less snake" is particularly evocative – a threat that constricts and suffocates without a clean, decisive cut. This speaks to the slow, agonizing decay that can plague a relationship. What are we to make of the burial of songs in a "drowning snail"? Perhaps the death of shared creative expression.
Ultimately, "Legless Love" is a haunting meditation on the fragility of love and the strange rituals we perform when it begins to crumble. It's a song about the ways we try to contain and control something as wild and untamable as human emotion, and the inevitable failure of those attempts. The lyrics analysis reveals a painful, yet beautiful, attempt to understand a love that exists in a state of perpetual wounding.
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