Gira lived with his parents in a relatively affluent suburb of Los Angeles, California, though they divorced when he was a young teenager. After staying with his alcoholic mother for much of his youth, he was sent to live with his father in Indiana and then Paris. He ran away from home and hitch-hiked across Europe, and was finally arrested for selling drugs in Israel. Although he was only a teenager at the time, he was placed in an adult prison. His father found Gira with the aid of Interpol and sent him back to the United States. Back in Los Angeles, he played in a band called Little Cripples and enrolled in art school and imagined that he would someday be a visual artist (Gira sketched obsessively); however, he soon became disillusioned with the elitism and academia surrounding the art world and dropped out. He was also in a band called Curtain, later called Strict Ids (source: Brendan Mullen's book "Live at the Masque"). However, Gira's interest in art is known to have affected his music; Inner Female is a study of Francis Bacon. It could also be said that Gira's visceral, surreal writing style is comparative to Bacon's paintings.
In 1979 Gira moved to New York City in order to start a band; he was influenced by No Wave and noise artists like Suicide and Glenn Branca. He played with the band Circus Mort before forming Swans. Before achieving success with his music, Gira was forced to work many tedious, backbreaking jobs in construction and demolition. He also began a short-lived art magazine, No.
Initially, Swans' focus was raw rhythm and abrasive textures, usually eschewing melody for visceral power. They became known for their abrasive experimental and post-industrial sound. The band's lineup and sound evolved over time, most markedly with the inclusion of Gira's eventual girlfriend, Jarboe, who added her ethereal voice and synthesizers to the group in 1985. Gira and Swans spent the next twelve years releasing studio, live, and side-project albums. Gira's frustration with the various record labels they recorded for grew over time.
After dissolving Swans in 1997 Gira released a solo album under his own name and began a new musical direction with The Angels of Light, which are a quieter, more acoustic-based group than Swans. Nonetheless, The Angels of Light retain much of the intensity of Gira's former project. While The Angels of Light are a rather traditional "song-based" group, Gira also spent time experimenting with soundscapes, found sound, and loops with the The Body Lovers project. He has also released several albums under his own name including Drainland (1995), The Somniloquist (2000, a spoken word album), and What We Did (2001), a collaboration with Windsor For the Derby's frontman Dan Matz.
Gira founded his own record label, Young God Records, which has released albums from such artists as Devendra Banhart, Mi and L'au, and Akron/Family as well as the Swans, The Angels of Light and The Body Lovers back catalogues.
Akron/Family served as Gira's backing band during the recording of and touring for The Angels of Light's 2005 album, The Angels of Light Sing 'Other People'.
Your Naked Body
Michael Gira Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Your naked body is waiting for me
Beneath a halo of underwater light
Reflecting red stars of madness
In your eyes, in my eyes...
And in the future there will be no one
And all the water will turn to stone
And in the desert where your memory lies
Beneath the cold, blue, starlight...
The lyrics to Michael Gira's song “Your Naked Body” are a haunting and surreal exploration of themes of love and loss, death and memory. The imagery in the song is vivid and dreamlike, suggesting a world of infinite possibilities and infinite impossibilities all at once. The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the song, invoking a sense of vastness and mystery with the image of a naked body waiting at the bottom of the deep black sea.
The subsequent lines in the first verse describe this body as being surrounded by a halo of underwater light, reflecting red stars of madness in both the singer's eyes and the body's eyes. This suggests a sense of mutual madness or obsession, as if the singer and the body are united in some kind of shared delirium. The second verse moves on to a more ominous tone, describing a future in which there will be no one and all the water will turn to stone. This creates a sense of desolation and finality, as if the world itself is slowly winding down to an end.
The final lines of the song provide a sense of closure and resolution, as the singer imagines themselves kissing the shadow of their beloved in the sand of a desert where her memory lies. This suggests a sense of finality, but also a sense of beauty and transcendence, as the physical body has given way to memory and the shadow becomes a kind of symbol of the relationship that once existed. Overall, the song is a poetic meditation on themes of love, loss, and memory, and it invites the listener into a surreal world of possibilities and imponderables.
Line by Line Meaning
Down at the bottom of the deep black sea
Your lifeless body is submerged in a dark, deep sea
Your naked body is waiting for me
Your deceased body awaits my presence
Beneath a halo of underwater light
Your body is glowing under the water
Reflecting red stars of madness
The distorted reflection of the stars above creates a haunting picture
In your eyes, in my eyes...
Our gazes meet in this eerie setting
And in the future there will be no one
I contemplate a bleak future with no one left
And all the water will turn to stone
The very nature of water will change to solid, death-like stone
And in the desert where your memory lies
Your memories are preserved in an unforgiving desert
I'll kiss your shadow in the sand
I will express my grief by kissing your vague imprint in the sand
Beneath the cold, blue, starlight...
The blue starry sky adds to the desolate feeling of the scene
Contributed by Isabelle V. Suggest a correction in the comments below.
Sans Red
M. Gira - Your Naked Body Lyrics:
[Verse 1]
Down at the bottom of the deep black sea
Your naked body is waiting for me
Beneath the halo of underwater light
Reflecting red stars of madness
[Chorus 1]
In your eyes, in my eyes
In your eyes, in my eyes
[Verse 2]
And in the future there will be no one
And all the water will turn to stone
And in the desert where your memory lies
I'll kiss your shadow in the sand
[Chorus 2]
Beneath the cold, blue, starlight
The starlight, the starlight
The starlight, the starlight
The starlight, the starlight
[Outro]
Fuck you all
Vitão
shit, just.