Analysis of song lyrics

We found analysing these lyrics to be very hard as, we found many different references to the song that we didn’t know the meaning to.

From what we could understand without the researching was the song is about someone who is trying to find paradise, hence to the repeating lyrics of “To find East of Eden”.

We found out that this book has links with the book by john Steinbeck called “East of Eden” which has themes of freedom, acceptance, and guilt. This was changed into a film in 1955 with James Dean. It is about a man who gives in to his temptations for a woman that his brother is seeing. This relates to the story of Cain and Able from the book of Genesis. In this story Cain was sent to be exiled in the Land of Nod and East of Eden is a location within it.

Overall we understood that the song was about not wanting to confine to society rules. As the song is about trying to escape and not wanting to be trapped anymore “Keep me from the cages under the control” the “Control” links to the society and how they control/ confine people to act a certain way.  

However the Land of Nod can also be referred to the mythical land of sleep “Go off to the land of Nod” plays with the phases “nod off” if we then link this back to not wanting to be confined to society the song could mean that the only way out of the control is to sleep, which could be seen as to suicide. The East of Eden could be seen as reaching Heaven after killing yourself.