Song Meaning

This track opens with a jarring image: a preacher "a-trawling" to the "House of Fuck" on a Sunday morning. The narrator immediately counters the preacher's aggressive demand for entry with an open-door policy, embracing "the right and the wrong." This sets up a central tension between a judgmental, exclusionary religious authority and the narrator's radical, all-encompassing acceptance of human experience, both sacred and profane. The lyrics then pivot to a visceral catalog of physical acts and desires, delivered with a raw, almost frantic energy. The preacher's pronouncement, "Crooked is the way and wide the road to regret," is twisted into a justification for the narrator's own embrace of carnal experience. The list that follows – "sucks, fucks, lubricious, kisses, humps, sticks, licks" – is a deliberate, unapologetic enumeration of the body's functions and pleasures, culminating in the provocative assertion, "And sticks." This section highlights the narrator's rejection of moralistic condemnation in favor of a frank acknowledgment of physical reality. The narrator's response to the preacher is a defiant embrace of diversity and desire, citing "couch sluts of every stripe" and "boys, and your girls, and the in-between types." The reference to Magdalene and Jesus underscores a perceived hypocrisy or at least a selective interpretation of religious history, suggesting that even divine figures understood the value of "a bargain." This challenges the preacher's rigid moral framework by pointing to a more complex, perhaps even transactional, understanding of faith and human connection. Ultimately, the song crafts a powerful, albeit profane, vision of acceptance. The narrator offers "the itch that never stops" and "the ass of always-come-along" not as sin, but as an essential, unending aspect of existence. The final lines, "An angry bellwether / Of what always goes wrong," suggest a defiant embrace of imperfection and the messy, uncontrollable nature of life itself, positioning the narrator as a truth-teller for those who exist outside conventional morality.