Cursed Six Strings

Song Meaning

A woman's deep resentment for a guitar frames a tragic love story. She recounts falling for a musician, a "rambler," who eventually leaves her and their child for his music. The opening lines immediately establish a visceral aversion to being buried with "cursed six strings." The core tension lies in the narrator's love for the rambler clashing with her intense animosity towards his instrument. She gave him her heart, but he prioritized his "great destiny" and his music, explicitly stating he "rambled and picked them strings over me." This perceived betrayal fuels her later actions, transforming the instrument into a symbol of abandonment. The lyrics masterfully personify the guitar, transforming it from an instrument into a rival and ultimately, a stand-in for the deceased. When the rambler dies, "all they sent home / For his next of kin were them cursed six strings in a casket," a chilling detail that underscores the guitar's dominance even in death. The narrator's subsequent act of burying the guitar "six feet in the ground" to silence it is a desperate, symbolic act of reclaiming agency from its pervasive influence. The emotional impact is amplified by the jarring, almost surreal twist in the second verse: "my shovel struck oil, and our soil was poisoned with Plazma." This unexpected detail, alongside the narrator's wish to "fly seven miles up to heaven" with "feathers in my spine," elevates the personal tragedy into something larger and more mythic. It suggests a world where grief and betrayal can literally poison the ground, making the narrator's longing for reunion both desperate and otherworldly.