Interpretations:Hall Of Heads

The guitar intro bounced around dial a song for a while, and is very Mono Puff first album. The lyrics may be about all the things listed below, but the melody of the song grates. Part of the disappointing second half of Apollo 18. (Mr Tuck)

Could it be about a piggy bank? -Drumstick

This is a song about a nightmare.

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Okay, so this is going to sound really weird, but I could swear that this has something to do with a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. You see, in a city named Sigil, there are three 'factions' who make and enforce the laws: The Harmonium, The Fraternity of Order (Guvners) and The Mercykillers. The three parts of this song perfectly represent them: The first for the harmonium the police and warriors, the second for the Guvners, and the third for the prison run by The Mercykillers, which is (in this song) the hall of heads. It all makes sense, to me anyway. Okay, there's my rant.

There's actually a pretty good chance that this song is about a satirical story called FROM HAND TO MOUTH, which was published in 1858 by Fitz-James O'Brien. The story is about a magical hotel that can not be escaped. After you stay for a few days, your legs are removed, and although technically all the people in the hotel are torsos, they're still referred to as "heads" in the book, thus the title "Hall of Heads." The fact that the patrons of the hotel have their legs amputated would explain the passage "your feet won't let you run." The reason that "you can't really hide" is that each room and all of the halls in the building have gigantic eyes installed in the walls. This is a little bit more iffy, but the meaning of the lines "you can't really hide, once you hear the call, the song of the hall of heads," could be a reference to the chapter where the protagonist is actually goin to leave before it's too late, but he hears the singing of what he imagines is a beautiful woman in distress. He turns out to be correct, and stays so that he can try to save her, dooming himself. At the end of the book, the entire story is revealed to be a dream. ~ Carc

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I've always thought this was describing torture - someone being tortured by being forced to look at the severed heads of his executed friends.

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The first time I heard this song I thought of Futurama (anyone who's seen the show will know what I mean). Though now I read the lyrics, that doesn't seem to fit anymore...

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I have thought about this for a while and decided that it is simply about a museum, a common ordinary museum, but a girl decides to snoop around a bit, somewhere in the museum there is a spider-like claw machine testing various detatched heads by placing them onto what appears to be a headless body straped onto a table.(instrumentals)and deep in the bowels of the museum the girl finds a majastic red doorway with intricate gold swirling designs. She hears someone singing so she looks through the keyhole (you look through the keyhole, duh) and sees a man, but she can only make out his head. Then the door gives way and she falls through (one step through the doorway) and finds herself in a long, long golden majastic hallway, and realizes the person singing is not a full person, but a head on a pedastal in the middle of the hallway, right in front of the door, with a label "special head". The walls are covered in shelves with heads on smaller display stands. A red carped starts rolling from the very end of the hallway, going down each stair and ending right at the special head (roll out that special head) all the heads are singing. Two large headless figures wearing black sports coats walk down the red carpet, they have the build of 2 bodyguards. One lifts the special head, it is still singing. The girl runs, in a dark room one of the heads suggests "hide underneath the porch", she runs and hides under the porch but an old forgotten head shakes the dird off itself as it pokes through the dirt, and tells her that she is not safe and to hide somewhere else (hide down behind the furnace) She runs down to the basement, but the two headless bouncers are close behind, passing the head between them and twisting it on like a top as they chase the girl. The head still sings. She ends up in a room and realizes that there are heads taking up every space she tries to hide in they are shouting "you can't realy hide", the headless figues have cornered the girl, and the figure now carrying the head places it on the others sholders, screws it on, and the figure now wearing it swivels it around on its neck as if it were stretching, then it raises a sythe/axe and, suddenly we see the girls head on the special pedistal (first *BUM*) she opens her eyes with terror (second *BUM!*). and so yea, thats all I got from that. --Diet Poop 09:30, 26 Jan 2006 (EST)

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I think the song is about the insidious appeal of the academic or intellectual life -- the so-called "life of the mind". The hall itself might be a major University or something more abstract, like the stable of contributors to The New York Review of Books. --Nehushtan 22:55, 26 Jan 2006 (EST)

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People say this song is about this. They say it's about that. They even say it's about a piggy bank. No. People are missing the point. The song is about a Hall with Heads in it that you can go in but not out. It's just a song made to freak people out (and it does a great job O.o). No deeper meaning. Especially not a piggy bank. Although all the words fit, the overall mood doesn't. It's a scary song, and piggy banks aren't scary. My two cents. ~AgentChronon

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The strongest impression I've gotten from the song (besides a Particle Man-esque thought that the song is simply about a place called the Hall of Heads whose caretakers won't let visitors leave) is that the Hall of Heads is a metaphor for the world in terms of society: disembodied human heads, meant to be a horrific sight, represent the sorts of horrors and other unpleasant things humanity's created for itself (murder and other forms of violence, greed and living in self-gratifying opulence, the need to assert oneself as superior, etc.). The Hall is not only representative of the world containing all of these things but the method of presentation -- the heads are always on prominent display, as opposed to something like a movie in a cinema, which isn't always playing. Plus, in a movie, the perspective of the viewer usually changes, so you're not always seeing the same thing. In a place where things are on display, though, there's no way to turn it off. Not to mention, the fact that a lot of these things are often glorified and celebrated ("Roll out the special head / This is our favourite one" is the main lyrical example, in addition to the fact that museums don't usually show off things that they consider bad. A real example would be the way society and media both glorify materialism). Moving from a view of this place through the keyhole to actually standing inside it could be likened to the gradual awakening to these things that we all go through -- the loss of innocence as our field of view opens up. Finally, even though the speaker reminds you many times of how you can't leave, there's one exception -- dying. The same can be said for life -- you're in it until you die, as redundant as that sounds. It's a less than positive view of the world, but it's pretty obvious that whoever's doing the singing isn't a tremendously positive person. You could extend the song, as such, to the words of someone who's so jaded that they consider the world as bad as a constant display of disembodied heads. Makes sense, I think, but it could just as easily be a song written Particle Man-style. Sui 01:20, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

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