An analysis of "Charon's Obol"

Hello Mitski fans! Our queen has released a new album a few days ago and every is talking about it and their favourite songs from it. My favourite at the moment is "Charon's Obol", which is a song about regret and the desire to start anew.

The song opens with the soft strum of a guitar that carries Mitski's voice and helps set the scene and rhythm. She sings of a group of dogs that gather every night around a young woman's house, which is followed immediately by a chorus of deep, resonant voices that mimic dogs barking. This setting preps the audience for interpretation and symbolism, as it is reminiscent of another song where Mitski sings of hounds, that being "I'm Your Man":

"I can feel it gettin' near

Like flashlights coming down the way

One day you'll figure me out

I'll meet judgment by the hounds"

One could argue that the hounds in "I'm Your Man" represent the guilt and turmoil that relentlessly pursue the singer, later intensified by the end of the song where real dogs can be heard barking in the background. Hence, we can extrapolate this symbolism to the dogs in "Charon's Obol". 

The tense scene of these opening lines is then broken up by the singer mentioning that these dogs were being fed by the owner of this house, an action whereby she nourishes and relieves her soul by caring for these dogs. The act of feeding them allows her to reminisce about her past and relive her memories; this echoes and contradicts the main theme of another song of Mitski's, "I Don't Like My Mind":

"I don't like my mind, I don't like being all alone in a room

With all its opinions about the things that I've done"

If the hounds represent regret, here the young woman is actively reminiscing and keeping these regrets alive by feeding them every night. She lets herself remember and think instead of filling her space with noise and sensation to distract herself from it, something she can do only in the presence of these dogs.

Later on, in the second part of the first verse it is revealed that these dogs, these regrets fed by this young woman, are not her own, that they belong to other women that lived and died in this house in the past, yet the current owner feeds them as if they were her own. This alone can open the door to interpretation: are these women literal women that came before this one and who imparted their regrets and guilt upon her? Are they metaphors for previous versions of oneself that have passed away as she grew older? Is there a secret third option? 

I personally am a partisan of the second option as Mitski has provided grounds for this interpretation earlier in "I Don't Like My Mind", where she mentions her skull having walls, another metaphor for her mind space which is semi-consistent throughout the sister album "The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We". Therefore, the previous owners of the house could be interpreted as previous versions of that young woman which have come and gone as time flew by, leaving nothing but regret.

The second verse gives some of the young woman's backstory, mentioning how she almost joined these girls in death and her move into the house despite societal pressure. She decided to "be the token coin in [the house's] mouth". Now, in Ancient Greek religion, coins were placed in the mouths of the recently deceased as a symbolic payment for the eponymous Charon so that he would transport their souls to the afterlife. Perhaps Mitski, by having this young woman move into this house, expresses that her arrival would move the house -inasmuch as it is a stand-in for the whole person- to a better place (a common name for the afterlife), either literal or figurative. However, her arrival in this house would mean that she has to contend and deal with the dogs belonging to its previous owners to keep them alive and never forget what she went through before she left. This feeling of wanting to move away is reminiscent of the album's opener "In A Lake":

"I'd never live in a small town, I've made too many mistakes"

"But in a lake you can backstroke forever, the sky before you, the dark right behind

And in a big city you can start over"

Moving away into this house for this young woman could be both figurative and literal, where she physically moved away but also could signify a change in mindset or state of being, a way of signifying that to the people who stigmatized her move, the version of her she was before is dead. Healing for her would then mean taking good care of the house, a metaphor for her body similar to the saying "your body is a temple" which comes from the Bible in 1 Corinthians 6:19 :

"You surely know that you body is a temple where the Holy Sprit lives

The Spirit is in you and is a gift from God. You are no longer your own"

Mitski is possibly comparing the women in the house to the Holy Spirit which dwells in a person's body like in a temple, or she might be reclaiming her autonomy from others by declaring that her body is indeed her own, that it belongs to her, that it is her house. It might also be a mix of both.

"Charon's Obol" is a song that means a great deal to me because of how I grew up and things that happened to me in the past that are similar to what is happening in this song. I moved away a lot as a child and had to quickly adapt in order to have a decent time wherever I went and had to contend with the social pressure for the changes I wanted to enact within myself to be "socially acceptable". Hearing that experience vocalized in this way in "Charon's Obol" really made me feel seen and heard so I am now very emotionally attached to this song.

I hope you liked my interpretation of this song! Let me know what y'all think in the comments below, and #stay awesome #stay cool and #stay woke.