Neptune City (song)

It begins with the narrator identifying himself as a ghost looking down on his own funeral – “You can’t see me from this view, all the way down, trailing the procession.” He says he’ll “hide out a few more days,” perhaps the mourning period for the remaining family, but then has to leave.

The narrator seems to wish he could have a more positive outlook on the “landscape I was born to,” ostensibly the same town where his funeral now takes place. He thinks if he looked at it differently, it could “make me new again.”

The chorus is divided between the narrator and the family left behind on Earth. In the first quatrain, the family’s “hearts are singing out” for the deceased. They are so bereaved that they sing a “cemetery song”, but if they could figure out a way beyond their grief – “if we knew just what we could do” – they could stop singing the cemetery song.

The second quatrain finds the narrator assessing his current state, “sitting over Neptune City”, wistfully acknowledging how much he misses it. He has one chance to briefly return – “I’ll come down, walk around a while” – until his time is up and he’s “sure I can never go home again.”

In a 2007 interview with The Star-Ledger, Atkins indicated the last quatrain could also apply to anyone looking back with ambivalence at their hometown. “After the fact, it took on all these different meanings about not being able to feel comfortable in the place that you always thought was home.” ^[2]

[edit] Background

Atkins told the Ledger, "I wasn't even planning on writing a song called 'Neptune City.' My sister and I were making pasta, and we were like, (sings) 'We're making pasta in Neptune City ...' Like, just kidding. And I was like, 'That (melody) sounds really cool.'"^[2] The lyrics were inspired by an uncle whom she never met. Long before Atkins' birth, her mother’s brother died in an accident at the age of 13. Years later, Atkins found the uncle’s Yamaha learner’s guitar in an attic and used it to teach herself how to play. ^[3]

[edit] Video

The video, directed by David Simon, features fantastic scenes and dreamlike sequences set in a faded amusement area, with moving images of Atkins transposed on older still photographs. The intentional grainy and distorted look of the video evokes the old peep shows one would have found in early 20th century seaside resorts like Brighton or Atlantic City.

It opens in a meadow of tall grass (with a barely visible Atkins to the left) and pans right, past an old roadside billboard. An image of the Roman god Neptune is briefly visible on the billboard before fading to black. The camera then moves in on the image of an old amusement park separated from the meadow by a body of water.

From there, the camera zooms in on Atkins in color, transposed on a black-and-white image of the old Atlantic City Boardwalk. As she sings “I’ll be leaving this place soon,” the picture changes to an image of rapidly deteriorating film but with a statue of Neptune clearly visible in the center of the frame, a reference to the namesake location.

Later scenes show Atkins lying down across an image of Tillie and walking down a set of stairs onto the beach. As the video progresses, the images play in reverse, with the final scene returning to the meadow with the billboard and finally Atkins by the roadside before fading to black. Throughout the video, Atkins is the only person seen both in color and moving. The still photos may represent snapshots of a distant time the singer cannot bring back. They could also represent the world of the living, from which the singer is forever separated.