Hallways
The hallway or hall as a recurring image of corridor-space - the domestic passage between rooms where movement and waiting both happen at length. The hallway carries the speaker through interior space rather than across a boundary, and the song revisits it as the site of late-night trajectories, surveillance from passers-by, suspended waiting, and shared routes remembered after the relationship has ended. Distinct from the door, which opens or closes in an instant, the hallway is the corridor itself: the extended space in which both motion and pause register.
The hallway carries the doubled charge of motion and suspension: the corridor as the space the speaker is moving through, and as the space she is standing still in while the relationship's direction is being chosen elsewhere. Whoever is shown in the hallway is shown in transit or in waiting: passing a partner without speaking, following someone out of a room, holding a cake at a party that hasn't begun, hearing a key turn at the far end. The image's force comes from the hallway's prolonged liminality - unlike a door, which is a moment, a hallway holds the speaker in the in-between.
Appears in 12 songs
“You brush past me in the hallway and you don't think I, I, I can see you, do you?”
“Cause I can see you waiting down the hall from me”
“Now you're running down the hallway”
“You were standing hallow-eyed in the hallway”
“I heard your key turn in the door down the hallway”
“they follow me down the hall”
“I remember your bare feet down the hallway”
“Danced in the kitchen, chased me down through the hallway”
“Soon they'll have the nerve to deck the halls that we once walked through”
“Holding all this love out here in the hall”
“Were you standing in the hallway with a big cake, happy birthday”
“They whisper in the hallway, "She's a bad bad girl”
“Got to the hallway, well, on my way to my loving bed”