The Locket

Song Meaning

The lyrics paint a stark portrait of a woman lost in memory, her present reality a cluttered, decaying space. Newspaper clippings and melted candles suggest a life lived in the past, while the sheer number of ashtrays hints at prolonged, perhaps anxious, waiting. She's trapped in a loop, her actions – repeating a name, fiddling with a locket chain – becoming a ritual of her isolation. The central tension lies in her desperate attempt to conjure a lost presence, specifically a man named Jon. The repeated phrase "over and over" and "over and under" emphasizes this obsessive cycle. Her plea to the mirror, "mirror me, mirror be something he is," reveals a profound desire to embody the object of her affection, or perhaps to have the mirror itself become him, a portal to a time when he was present. This isn't just longing; it's an existential plea for connection. The most striking craft element is the recurring imagery of the locket and the mirror, acting as dual conduits to her obsession. The locket holds his face, a tangible fragment of the past, while the mirror is an imagined gateway. The repetition of "mirror me, mirror be something he is" transforms the mirror from a reflective surface into a desired entity, a silent witness and a potential substitute for the absent Jon. Her voice, described as "stumbling along," underscores the fragility of her mental state and the brokenness of her attempt to recapture what's gone. This writing is effective because it grounds an abstract emotional state in concrete, almost tactile details. The accumulation of discarded objects and the physical act of touching the locket create a palpable sense of her stagnant existence. The lyrics don't just tell us she's sad; they show us a woman consumed by a past that has effectively erased her present, making her desperate, fragmented pleas to the mirror all the more haunting.