Despite What You Ve Been Told Analysis Essay

Blood Stains and Former Friends Within Two Gallants’ song “Despite What You’ve Been Told” the greatest lesson to be learned is that lust cannot replace love and, as Norman Cousins once said, “The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” This song describes the journey of a man dealing with loss of love and himself through a sexual encounter and the effect it has on him. The folky-rock sound of Two Gallants is often associated with lighter subjects, while this song surprises by discussing rather dark topics. “Despite What You’ve Been Told” discusses loss and takes a wistfully satirical stance towards unhealthy coping methods in a stanza pattern similar to the stages of grief. In this pattern, which repeats a total of three times, the first stanza of each cycle is about the woman he is engaging

He creates reasons to stay with her by the repetition of the words “Well, I guess” (Line 1) at the beginning of each stanza with exception for the last cycle in which he just says “I guess” (Line 37). This dropping of one word shows that he has decided and no longer really needs to convince himself to sleep with the woman. As the cycle continues this first stanza in the pattern depicts his advancement with the woman. The final line in the stanzas move from him just staying with her, to laying with her, to deciding to “dive right in” (Line 40), each progressively more obvious euphemisms for sex. It becomes obvious that the speaker blames the woman for his actions by how he describes her. In the first of these cycles he compares her red lipstick to a “blood stain” (Line 1), which is certainly a hyperbole, much as someone would imagine the lips of a dangerous seductress. In the second cycle the speaker says that he should “climb down off my rugged cross/ And lay with you” (Lines 17-18). This is an allusion to the