"Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James"

A couple days ago, I ran across my note on "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James" that I wrote about in this post about a year ago:  there's a contrast between the fixedness of "Hanging things upon the line" and the movement of "your life slip[ping] away."  I added the concession that "one is literal, and the other is metaphorical," but I realized recently that in a way, this difference between the tangible and intangible actually matches the contrast between being static and passing away.

"Happy Families"

Yester-day, I was thinking about the lines "Look around at the things God created / Look around at the things He has made" in "Happy Families (with Edwin O'Garvey and His Showband)," and I realized that they exhibit the same sort of parallelism that's common in some parts of the Bible, especially the Psalms and Proverbs.  (For example, Proverbs 16:18:  "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.")  This borrowing of a Biblical style is appropriate for the quasi-religious tone of the song.

In "Happy Families (with Eddie 'Fingers' Garvey)," the couplet is slightly different but has the same feature:  "Look around at the things that God created / Look around at the things that He hath made."