Soul Meets Body

" I do believe it's true, that there are roads left in both of our shoes. But if the silence takes you, then  I hope it takes me too... Where soul meets body." Soul Meets Body is a song by the American indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie. I first heard it in 8th grade, on the bus ride to Washington D.C. on Jeff Raig's cd player. The fact that I remember my introduction to this song and band reminds me how much the song and the band means to me. Back then, I never really understood why I liked it or what the lyrics meant, I just knew that it was a good song that had a deep meaning. What that meaning was did not matter to me, I just knew it meant something and that makes a big difference in today's media which is characterized by bass-heavy drug/sex-referencing crap. Now that I am older (I like to think much older, though it really has only been 4 years!) I have recently gone back and reassessed what this song means to me and the feelings it invokes. I see past the purely physical images depicted by the song and find new meanings in phrases such as "the roads" left in the two lovers shoes. I believe that Ben Gibbard (the lyricist/singer) is trying to convey that both him and his love have many days left before them and still must live out a majority of their lives. The silence he references is the impending death, that is bound to take one of the lovers away. Ben hopes that this is him, or that if it is his love, that he will join her quickly. "Where soul meets body" is the place that Ben wants to exist with his love, a sort of limbo that exists between corporeal and incorporeal. An eternity of love that neither him nor his lover will ever have to leave. This imaginary state of being is unfathomable to most, but coveted by all. I find it interesting that Ben brings up his common motif of being together in death, but in this song death is not the desired place for both of their spirits, but rather a potential compromise. In short, love transcends life and death and creates a new state "where soul meets body" in which love can exist eternally.