“It was the perfect day to get killed by Geese,” I say.
My roommate keeps mincing garlic. “That would totally happen to you, to be honest.” Eventually they realize I’m talking about a band, and not a horrible day of bird violence. And it leaves me introspective. So I let the swinging door do its thing behind me and return to my room. We live in an old Victorian mansion that’s been cut up into apartments. Four of us share the kitchen, but we live across a hallway from each other. I hadn’t met them until I moved in.
It’s September 25th, 2025, the day before the release of Geese’s 3rd official album, Getting Killed. I’ve just come from the listening party at Electric Fetus where I stood under a speaker with a pen, the lyrics all printed out and my two bandmates reading along over my shoulders.
“Which song are we on?” Josh had asked. Title track. “What’s with all the feet?” I think it’s a Jesus thing. Don’t worry about it.
Does the music feel crisp and positive, or am I just hearing it through a sky-blue lens? Maybe the marketing team kicked so much ass that they pre-wired my brain to think it sounds like a clear day. Or maybe that was Kenneth Blume. Or maybe that was the point. The lyrics are very Man Vs. Everything as the narrator flops from frying pan to fire. And on top of that, the guitar, bass, and drums keep his heart beating. But with charm!
My room used to be some kind of dining hall or solarium, I can’t remember. It’s divided in two sections by a double-sided fireplace that “probably works” but I’m not going to find out. The sunny half of the room looks like something you’d find in Nancy Drew. Wood-paneled walls, wrought-iron sconces (they all work!) and large windows that creak all the way up to the fancy relief ceiling, where decades of artisan plaster sometimes chip off onto the floor when I sleep. The other half of the room is in the dark.
I moved back to Minneapolis six months ago and these damn boxes are still yucking up the place. I haven’t had time to pare down. There’s an entire corner with paintings soaked in dust, too tall for their bins to close. Mouthfuls of empty canvas, and drawers stuffed with acrylic paint I only touch on moving days. Markers, pencils, watercolor palettes, charcoal sticks and pastels. Everything’s leaning. My art degree rests flat on top of the bookshelf. You can change and still choose me.
Do I really look like I would both enter and lose a battle to a gaggle of geese? American geese? I’m getting out of this gumball machine. The album’s imagery tugs at my love for adventure. Islands & water, movement & stagnancy, feet & horses, death & taxes, love & war, loneliness, religious iconography. Maria. The Virgin Mary? There’s duality in just about everything on a backdrop of clean and spacious sound. How the hell am I supposed to analyze something that’s vague enough to allow for an entire rainfall of interpretations? Cameron Winter repeats more than usual on this album and I wonder what he really means.
I’ll repeat what I say
But I’ll never explain
So you don’t have to waste your time
Well shit. Shut it down, boys. We’re giving up.
You don’t have to waste your time
Hiking up a hundred hills
You don’t have to, but I will
So he’ll put in the effort to understand himself? Good for him. Unless he means that it’s futile for even him to understand himself, and will still try anyway. In which case, good for him.
Will it wash your hair clean
When your husbands all die
Will you know what I mean
Will you know what I mean
Dolce. Perhaps the narrator’s talking to spouses left behind as their husbands head to war. The choir-style vocals might suggest many people are asking this question, or that one person asks the question in a way that takes up all his space. Will you know what I mean?
The girls didn’t laugh at my joke. “Oh. Eva. No.” They thought the stupid thing I said was serious. Dumbest thing I could think of too, no way they’d miss it. Those pitying frowns. Yuck. Let me dance away forever. I haven’t seen them in years.
I’m on the way to IKEA for some prettier boxes and the check engine light is on again. I crank up “Trinidad.” There’s a bomb in my car! Hold on now, so the speaker is the bomb in the song (all that screaming, he’s going off bro!), he’s also the car that’ll blow up and also the road whose path is already paved and chosen, horses running him into the ground no matter which island he ends up on. Our narrator is both the road runner and the coyote. Is he chasing his own tail in a perpetual attempt to understand himself? Or is he trying to discover what home means?
My son is in bed / My daughters are dead / My wife’s in the shed / My husband’s burning lead / The rest are force fed or else baked into bread / And nothing’s been said for four and a half days / When that light turns red I’m driving away
We start the album with volcanic anticipation. The bomb doesn’t go off. And the next song is Cobra. But Eva, you must answer the most burning question of Trinidad! What does the title mean? The important thing here is that it’s an island far away from Long Island City, where the album ends. Maybe it’s the Holy Trinity, maybe it’s an inside joke from a late night on Geoguessr. The real question is: Who perpetrated all that violence? Who baked them into bread? The narrator never comes clean, he simply states how things are. So is he really the bomb of the song, or is he a victim trying to escape? No matter how many times I enter this IKEA, I cannot remember how to leave.
You can make the cobras dance / But not me. There’s a short story that goes something like “Why are you surprised by the bite? You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.” Coulda sworn I saw a chalk outline music video for “Cobra” that was the full length of the song one morning. Maybe it was too early to be more than Half Real but I thought it was the official music video. It had no plot, just the same few shots of the band lying in a parking lot getting chalk-outlined over and over. Made no damn sense and pissed me off. Then it made me laugh and I thought it was brilliant, then it pissed me off again. No thesis in sight.
Is the whole album sarcastic? Is it bitter? It has so much dichotomy spilling out of its mouth and yet I must decipher the ingredients based on taste alone. This album is for real Mama Bird-ing me. Maybe I should give up and write a think piece about the futility of trying to understand the heart of another person. About absurdism or whatever the hell Camus was on about. I will never explain. Damn Sisyphus essay! I toss the new storage boxes in the car. I wonder how much stuff I can get rid of.
I finally let go of my 600+ day streak on Duolingo. And last night was my final show with the old band. Next week, I’ll haul my drums to my new band’s practice spot. It’s Josh, Nick and me. We still need a name. The new boxes are easy to assemble, but the six-tiered shelving unit still looks daunting. There’s kitchen stuff I’ll need for my next place and winter coats I’ll take out soon. So much stuff I need later and can’t shed right now.
There’s a horse on my back
And I may be stomped flat
But my loneliness is gone
All my loneliness is gone
If that were true, he wouldn’t have said it like that. Hit his chest like that. It’s been a few years since that psychiatrist asked if I was dating anyone. A sad little laugh escaped me. No, I gave up on that. “Is that okay with you?” No.
I turn on the vacuum and think about the Pink Moon Hike this April. The Landscape Arboretum holds them every full moon. I followed the pink tea lights that lined the pathway around the whole lake. It must’ve taken a week to set up. The other people were shadows in the grass, happy and chatting and glowing and I may be stomped flat. Got back in my car and sank over the steering wheel. There are promises you make to yourself in these times. But my loneliness is gone.
My leg catches for the third time on the same box, no matter where I put the damn thing. Everything is in my way and everything is where I put it. I just need the rest of this room to look as put-together as the bookshelf corner. Things I studied in neat little sections: poetry, Mandarin, Japanese. A different shelf has an abstract I painted called Dance that was inspired by Heaven Official’s Blessing. There was always a hope to be understood in everything I learned. Yearning is cadmium red.
General Smith told me / I would never smile again / He said that I would never smile again, but not to worry / For all people must stop smiling once they get what they’ve been begging for
So he got what he was begging for. I wonder what it was. A dog begging for boiling water on the stove is a real Monkey’s Paw situation. Sometimes you don’t know the reality of what you ask for.
How much does being understood really matter anymore? Emerson said something about this. “Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” Perhaps I won’t come to a conclusion.
The last tenant was here for ten years, and it looks like it’s been about that long since any of the twenty-two curtains were cleaned. They’re screwed into the window frames, so I can’t just chuck them in the laundry and call it a day. I settle for brushing their teeth with the vacuum. Spring cleaning in October.
I’m getting killed by a pretty good life. That was a Modest Mouse song, too. Maybe Cameron meant it in the same way. “The Good Times are Killing Me.” I hope Getting Killed isn’t about addiction. Nobody likes how that story ends. Ben died from a brain aneurysm and not an overdose, but that’s the kind of thing made more possible by alcoholism. He wanted to visit me in Japan. Today’s his anniversary. It’s been a full year since I was in Kyoto trying not to cry into my Doutor coffee, and later losing it on the steps outside a Vietnamese restaurant. But you can’t write an analysis based on hope.
Like Charlamagne in Vietnam. To my knowledge, the Holy Roman Emperor spelled his name “Charlemagne” and never went to Vietnam. I couldn’t find out if Charlamagne tha God went to Vietnam either. However, I did find the main character in Defiant Comics’ 1994 series Charlemagne. Charles Smith. General Smith told me I would never smile again. The main character left home to find his brother who went MIA in the Vietnam War.
My local comic book shop only has issues #2 and #5 and tells me to call around to the other ones. Am I really gonna hunt down some random comic series just to understand an album that might not even be making a reference to it in the first place? Ben would’ve laughed. I have no idea where I’m going / here I come.
So basically, Charles gets to Vietnam and takes a random bus not knowing where he’s going. He stops smiling when he gets what he was begging for. Lots of the story takes place in NYC and there’s even a villain named Bottom, if that does anything for you.
There are lots of ways to “get killed”. In tarot, the Death card represents change. Heartbreak, burnout, quitting, letting go, changing as a person, changing your perspective. Tarot is full of symbolism, and there are four symbols on all the promo: trumpet, sword, gun, crucifix. Only the gun and the crucifix make their way into the lyrics. The other two are alluded to.
Maria cried out to me, “You can either leave / Or you can stop playing that cowbell with your gun’” / So I say watch out Long Island City, here I come.
If only one thing can be true and he chooses to leave, then he will continue to play that cowbell with his gun. As a drummer, I have it on good authority when I tell you this is an inefficient and dangerous way to play the cowbell. You’ll just have to trust me on this. The bullet could ricochet, the sound of the gun far outdoes the sound of the cowbell, the cowbell is destroyed, and you could injure your bassoonist. There’s really no point to it. So our guy is making things hard for himself, which seems to be the only thing he knows how to do. He insists upon it!
I had a TA in my Introduction to Logic class who started one lesson with “As soon as you learn about ambiguity, you’ll see it everywhere. I’m sorry.” Could the sword on the posters be a double-edged sword? With all the double meanings, that would fit. Even if that’s not the case, nobody would question a sword because they’re super cool 100% of the time. They’re evergreen, baby!
You look green / Like you’ve been / To see islands of men
Thought you’d find / What it means / Peace of mind
You can’t keep / Womankind / In your dreams
You can’t keep / Running away / From what is real / And what is fake
Green with sickness or green with envy? If the person is unable to dream about womankind on the islands of men, then perhaps the recipient of the conversation has more thinking to do. He sings in a gentle way here, like he’s talking to a friend. Maybe he means that womankind can’t stay only in your dreams, you must make it a reality. Transitioning, or discovering you’re not into women.
Nick says it’s too dark in my living room. There are two old-timey sconces and four lamps. It’s not a big room. This should be enough light. The new square one is so bright that it’s uncomfortable to face directly if you’re trying to read or watch TV. Somehow, it is still too dark.
There are so many interpretations of Getting Killed. Through a lens of war, the narrator and his loved one(s) go through mental turmoil and head back home, forever changed. Through a romantic lens, he suffers immensely as he gives his heart freely to those who keep crushing him. Taken from a queer perspective, the speaker could be struggling with sexuality and gender, or talking to someone he loves who is going through a time of significant questioning. Go through the Geese subreddit and you’ll find a dozen more perspectives.
If all these meanings can be supported with evidence from the lyrics, what’s the point of trying to analyze them in the first place? My varied interpretations have a few things in common.
- There’s perpetual turmoil within the narrator and the one he’s speaking to.
- Death appears as change. Either by killing the parts of himself that hold him down, or allowing them to die so he can face what comes next.
- Despite the bullshit, the narrator keeps trying. He courageously struggles through his journey without knowing the end or if what he hopes for is what’s best for him. Is he a dog begging for boiling water? Do you know what it’s like to bow down down down to Maria’s dead bones?
The album begins in a chaotic nightmare. The narrator escapes the car bomb and travels from island to island in a directionless way, moving for moving’s sake. And while so many things happen over the course of 11 songs, he is forced to die over and over until he realizes he has the momentum and the will to set sail on a new journey. Like Charlamagne on the midnight bus / I have no idea where I’m going / Here I come.
I’m supposed to be looking for a coffee table at this consignment store. My eyes land on the perfect thing. A wide table rests in the middle of the furniture section. And on top of that, there’s a footstool. It’s super soft and emerald green, and it’s in the shape of a mushroom! The top comes off and the “stem” is hollowed out for storage. Back home, I place the footstool on the baby pink rug in front of the couch. Ah! That’s it! I wondered how a place with such lovely wooden paneling could feel so cold and sterile. It was simply a lack of whimsy! A few boxes remain, but my shelves look neater and cleaner, and the whole place is warming up. There’s still no coffee table and it’s still too dark in here. But I know what to do next.
Related reading: With Geese As Our Witness: An Analysis of “Taxes”
Geese Band Members: Max Bassin, Dominic DiGesu, Emily Green, Cameron Winter
Sources: Getting Killed, Geese, Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, YuYu Hakusho, One Piece Tiktok @Hannahwiththebadbananas
