Pulp Songs - The Trees Lyrics

Pulp - The Trees

Pulp - The Trees Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: We Love Life
Released: 2001

The Trees Lyrics

I took an air-rifle, shot a magpie to the ground & it died without a sound.
Your skin so pale against the fallen Autumn leaves &
No-one saw us but the trees.

Yeah, the trees, those useless trees produce the air that I am breathing.
Yeah, the trees, those useless trees; they never said that you were leaving.

I carved your name with a heart just up above - now swollen,
Distorted, unrecognisable; like our love.
The smell of leaf mould & the sweetness of decay
Are the incense at the funeral procession here, today.
In the trees, those useless trees, etc.

You try to shape the world to what you want the world to be.
Carving your name a thousand times won't bring you back to me.
Oh no, no I might as well go & tell it to the trees.
Go & tell it to the trees, yeah.

Writer/s: MYERS, STANLEY/SHAPER, HAL/COCKER, JARVIS/MACKEY, STEVE
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

The Trees Song Chart

"The Trees" is the other half of the double A-side released in October 2001 as a lead-up to the release of Pulp's then-latest album We Love Life - the other side was the track "Sunrise." The single as a whole charted at #23 in the UK.

Jarvis Cocker talks frankly about the song's genesis, noting that it was all spawned from a sample of the song "Tell Her You Love Her" by Stanley Myers and Hal Shaper. Said Cocker: "I'd had (that song) for about four or five years and wanted to write a song around it. I'd had loads of goes. We were getting to the end of the sessions, so we had one more go and we nailed it."

The initial lines of the lyrics explain how the narrator "took an air-rifle, shot a magpie to the ground and it died without a sound." Cocker was keen to explain that this was hardly an autobiographical reference: "I'd like to point out that I've never shot an animal with an air rifle! There was an air pistol at my granny's when I was growing up and I was allowed to play with it without any pellets in it. As soon as I got to an age where I might have wanted to go out and shoot creatures, it was hidden. So I've never shot even a magpie... even though they are one of my least favorite because they bully other birds and they spoil their nests and stuff like that. They're a bit of a pest actually."

The lyrics paint an evocative picture of lust and a dark surrounding of forests and woodland - this was specifically in order to paint a picture of the mysterious world between the trees where any number of things could end up happening. Cocker explains: "The idea of the lyrics in that song is just... the idea of the trees being there and all the kind of human dramas that could happen in a forest: people meeting for an illicit affair or whatever, like that. But the trees are impassive to that. And the way that people will carve their name on the bark of a tree, thinking that's some kind of mark of permanence in a relationship, but then you go back a year or two later and try and read it, it'll be all like [twisted], because the tree doesn't grow in a linear way."