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Interpretations:When It Rains It Snows

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Obviously, this isn't the real meaning of the song, but I've noticed that this song has a lot of similarities to the Buce Willis/Jessica Alba story in Sin City. It's snowing durring atleast part of it, there's a demented guy with a smiling, yellow face, Jessica Alba isn't home, but if she were, Bruce would find her there. Those are just a few I can name off the top of my head, but I think it's a cool coincidence. -Cronny

I think the song is about a robber who would see all tehse things if he owned the house or was outside. In the crime scene, several possible suspects are found, and there are enough that he's not caught. - sangokyu

Surely his crimes go beyond robbery:

"There's a nut with a shotgun: bang bang bang"

He means to murder someone. The detail of the furniture having been barely moved is certainly evocative of a murder scene. What's interesting to me is the perspective of the song. I believe the narrator here is actually the person who has been murdered:

"There's a knock on the door. And if I were at home, they'd find me there."

It's a break-up song that ends up in mass murder, like I'll Sink Manhattan. He sees another guy knocking on his door, and his girlfriend smiling from the window at the guy. When he gets home, he finds the "Dear John" note. Later, he gets a gun and starts gunning down a crowd of people that she happens to be in (she's probably the waitress). Enough people are gunned down that they'll never figure out who was the intended target of the assassination. Don't try this at home. --Nehushtan 21:07, 16 Feb 2006 (CST)

The above makes sense, but what of the title? I think it's a reference to the unexpected. Bacon warrior 23:52, 27 Feb 2006 (CST)
I think that there are firemen and doctors and everything because he goes on his shooting spree at a halloween costume party. Nobody will know who the shooter was when all costumes are removed.--tehbagel ( o ) 13:45, 26 May 2006 (CDT)
The yellow face is probably a SpongeBob custome (for example. Yellow Power Ranger, etc.); ie it's halloween, further reinforcing the fact that he's at a halloween party. The furniture's barely been moved because the cops searched his house. I'm not sure what "when it rains it snows" means. I think it's a reference to somebody TPing his house. When it rains, it snows (TP is white). In this scenario, it could have been actually raining, making the TP stick to the door and house. But it could be a reference to the fact that he is in jail, and semen is white. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that.--tehbagel ( o ) 07:45, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps the title can be interpreted this way: when it rains (when his life is going this badly) it snows (his heart turns cold -- enough to do this terrible thing) --Nehushtan 21:56, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

See, I've always had a totally different take on the song. I saw the singer as being agorophobic - or afraid to leave a confined area. You start by taking the line "There's a note on the door that I adore" and, rather than seeing it as a note that the singer adores, but rather as a note on a door that the singer adores. In other words, the singer loves the confines of his house and all of the action is being done against the door that he loves.

That established, the singer is coming up with excuses not to leave his home. His first hypothetical is that there might be a knock on the door by a smiling yellow face - something warm and friendly - which he would miss if he was not home. His second hypothetical - the big one - is that someone might leave a note which contains the incomprehensible line "When it rains, it snows" and - had he been home, he would have been able to ask what that means rather than wondering why. He repeats this in the chorus - "'When it rains, it snows,' I wonder why" - to slyly suggest that the listener doesn't know what it means, reinforcing his reasoning to stay home so he can know what it means.

Seeing that what he thought to be obvious logic was failing, he turns to the desperate final hypothetical - a common one among people afraid to leave their house - that someone out there might be a killer waiting for him. He then compounds this twisted logic by saying that anyone could be a nut with a shotgun, making it infinitely dangerous to be around anyone. --JiuNoon 23:32, 3 May 2006 (CDT)

For the most part I agree with Nehushtan's interp. In short, the guy's girlfriend broke up with him, and so he goes and shoots a bunch of people that includes the ex-girlfriend, but nobody knows who the intened target really was.

Rain and snow are both forms of percipitation, and in actuality, snow is just rain that has froze before it fell. Snow is like a harsher rain that has frozen over and won't imediately sink into the ground. 'When it rains, it snows' refers to the guy. The rain is like the tears he would cry over his ex leaving him. The snow, like the rain, represents an unpleasant emotion the guy has, but one stonger and more violent than his sadness. This is the emotion that made him want to murder several people. The guy is a nut with an uncontrolable temper and he overreacts to everything. Therefore, in the guy's case, when it rains, it snows. --Gannabel

What he said. --Nehushtan 16:18, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

I have like this song from the first time I listened to it, and it didn't sound all that depressing to me, it just sounds like a guy at therapy, or something like that. It sounds to me like he thought he was visited by Walmart, so decided to go out, and missed a visitor. The visitor seemed to enter, barely move anything in search of him, and finally leave a note on the door. He doesn't understand it, but he takes it as a fact and maybe a code. After some hesittion, he talks about hearing a shotgun and seeing three people, but they'll never know who without him. Then he avoids the topic by talking about the note again. ~Qz

I think it's pretty funny that people would interpret the "smiling yellow face" as Sponge Bob or the WalMart symbol. This song was written in 1985, when neither of those things existed. The smiling yellow face was a popular icon of the '70's from t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc... It was pretty ubiquitous for a long time. It was often accompanied by the phrase "Have a nice day," as in "Have a nice day/You want it when?" from Snowball in Hell. I guess I'm just old enough to remember all of this, so it changes my own interpretation of that part of the song. You can interpret a song to mean whatever it means to you, so I don't think it's "wrong," but I can say with pretty good certainty that the Johns weren't thinking of Sponge Bob or WalMart when they wrote that line.  :=) --Zeppyfish

I like all the interpretations casting the narrator as a criminal, because when I first heard this song I thought the opposite: the narrator was really the victim of first a burglary, then an injury at the hands of a gun nut - possibly more severe than just an injury, if you want to go a bit further.

In the first verse, I parse "There's a knock at the door that I adore" as him adoring the door instead of the knock, which implies that the house is his own. He's not at home, but someone is outside his window and they're knocking to check whether the house really is empty - which might not be the logical thing to do when planning a burglary, but never mind. The narrator only realises all of this later because he wasn't at home, so he never actually saw the thief and can only picture their face as a generic smiley face. When he does get back, he notices his furniture has been moved slightly ("barely" means still perceptible), but all that's left is a note from the thief as one final touch of humiliation, and he's completely unable to do anything about it.

The song title and chorus are connected to the saying "when it rains, it pours", but the meaning is slightly changed: bad things don't just happen to the narrator all at once, they're also harsher (colder) than what might have happened to somebody else. He wonders why, because there's no obvious reason for it, but in the end he knows it's just random chance.

Later on, he goes out for a meal (that's the only way I can fit the waitress into this interpretation...), but unfortuately runs into some nuts with guns and is shot ("bang bang bang"). The emergency services are called - maybe the gun nuts have also set fire to the place, explaining the fireman - but again, the narrator can't retaliate in any way, because he didn't even manage to see which nut was the one who shot him. When it rains, it snows.

Summary of this interpretation: the song is about helplessness and a guy who's very, very unlucky. ~ blitzente (talk) 16:35, 19 April 2009 (UTC)





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