(The) Harvey Danger Database

Picture, Picture

Recorded

Release history

Credits

Lyrics

Dog in the manger, always a danger
You got me so, so wrong, so what?
So long, don’t be a stranger
It had barely started out before it started heading south
in the never-ending story of a love that dare not shut its mouth1

I get the picture (picture)
I think I get it
Think, no—I think I know
I wish I didn’t
Still, I think I get it

Behind the curtain, we got to flirting
It was a gateway drug—I know, I know
It’s disconcerting
Even now when I’m still driving by your house
when it’s late at night and the lights are out
and I saw somebody sneaking in your side door
What are friends for, anyway?
I’m just wondering who you think
you are fooling with such a tired myth
that says some people are better off alone
than with a stepping stone

I get the picture (picture)
I think I get it
Think, no—I think I know
I wish I didn’t
Still, I think I get it

Why do you insist on being such a girl about it?
You said you hope we could still be friends
I doubt it
No one owes a debt
Index finger, second fret
Another song to torch
to warm the winter of our disconnect2

Now, I’m still trying to decide
between thwarted lust and wounded pride
when I see your absence everywhere I look
and even when I close my eyes

I get the picture (picture)
I think I get it
Think, no—I think I know
I wish I didn’t
Wish I could be cold, cold
like certain people up in the mixture
I get the picture
I think I get it

  1. ‘I am true Love, I fill / The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’ / Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will, / I am the Love that dare not speak its name.’ — Lord Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves” (1894). Famously used against Oscar Wilde in his 1895 trial for “gross indecency” (viz., homo­sexuality). ↩

  2. Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York… — the opening lines of William Shakespeare’s Richard III. ↩

Quotes

SCN: [The Kill Rock Stars release of LBL is] a little different. It feels different for us because we changed the order of the second half and we swapped a song from the bonus disc with a song that was on the record. “Incommunicado” was on the record and “Picture Picture” was on the bonus disc and we switched them… We felt that it didn’t fit on the record, that it was too aggressive… As time went by, it became clearer that those sharper edges were missing from the record, I think. Now it feels like the record is actually done, and having the power to revise it like that was really exciting. Because at first we thought, maybe we should leave it because that’s the way it was, but then we thought, you know, in every period of this band’s life I thought, I wish we had done that differently. And this was a chance to do that. It’s a tiny victory, but it feels huge for us.SS

SCN: More rock AND more talk!10A

SCN: [“Dog in the manger”] is when you are guarding something that you don’t want. You may not be available for, say, I don’t know—a relationship with someone—but then you try to discourage or disparage anyone else from having it. It’s that “I don’t want it, or I can’t have it, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let anyone else have it.”AD

Notes

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