The Song is Eet by Regina Spektor, from the 2009 album, far (video directed by Adria Petty who also directed the video for Us that greatly contributed to putting Regina on the map):
The term "eet" refers to the backspace key on a typewriter, the key that backs the carriage up a space to let you type over a mistake, hence the prominence of that motif in the video. Aside from the poetic resonance of the do-over imagery in itself, I seem to recall her saying in interviews when the album came out that the obscurity of the word "eet" had some importance to the inspiration for the song. She wanted it to convey something of how it felt for a girl of 9 speaking only Russian, with no English other than the bootlegged Beatles tapes her father had played for her from her earliest childhood in Soviet-era Moscow, to find herself suddenly living in a world-- specifically The Bronx, New York-- where everyone but her spoke that same gibberish, and the sense of how it felt when the babbling in those songs she'd known her whole life started to signal meaning.
Here are the lyrics from the official booklet that accompanied the album. Read them as you listen:
She follows them to the letter. The line I would most like to draw your attention to is the charmingly orthographically challenged: "you're ears in your headphones to drown out your mind". You are not ears in your headphones, Regina. Or are you? Maybe she's even deeper than I thought? Would not surprise me. But as a non-native English speaker who had different aspirations for her second language she has copped to not being spelling bee material in interviews so let's go with the interpretation that the line she intends us to hear is: your ears in your headphones. Maybe it's because I devoured the booklet as I was learning the album that to this day that is the line I always hear her sing.
Which brings me to my point, because if you already sing the lyrics to yourself whenever you hear the song, the probability is almost 100% that I've just blown your mind. For I have yet to find an unofficial lyrics site or a YouTube cover of any quality (andtherearemanyofquality) in which that line is not rendered: "you're using your headphones".
Or maybe you've missed it again. In the version Regina sings, the ears are clamped inside the innards of electronics equipment that serves to swamp the head the ears belong to in an embrace of escape from the barrage of words from the internal voice that will not shut up. In the version every one else sings, the ears are missing altogether from the equation. It's a subtle difference-- one that has almost no bearing on the literal meaning of the phrase-- but it's a difference. "You're using your headphones to drown out your mind" is prose; "Your ears in your headphones to drown out your mind" is poetry. This means that everyone who hears or performs the song Eet ever, is doing it wrong (wrong I say!), with the exception of 2 people (and, face it, I may be the only one of the two who actually cares).
End of story, right? Wrong again! For on Regina Spektor's latest album, Remember Us to Life,history is repeating itself. The song in this case is Grand Hotel, possibly among the greatest in her epic catalog:
The second verse is where the trouble lies:
Under the floorboards, there's a deep well
That leads to a spring that sprung up in hell
That's where old devils danced and kissed
And made their blood pacts in the ancient mists
I did not buy the CD version of the album, just the download, but from what I can tell there is not an accompanying booklet for the CD or at least images of it are not readily available online. In any case, I'm basing my certainty about this on my ears, on, again, the poetic sense of it, and -- I mean, come on!-- on my track record. Nevertheless once again, the version of the last line that is proliferating on lyrics sites and YouTube videos is this:
And made their blood pacts in the ancient myths
While I could be wrong this time and everyone else right, I would be sad if that were so because the version I hear befits the song. Once again: Ancient myths: prose, and tin-eared prose at that; Ancient mists: Poetry.
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Speaking of pacts ... take some heart that much of the prevailing opinion from many of those still in the Paris Climate Agreement is that Trump out of the agreement might be somewhat better for the climate than Trump micromanaging in his typical cloddy inept fashion from within. Vent, communicate, plan, push. The agreement stands with or without. The climate and the struggle to mitigate our effect on it will catch us on the flip.
