House
The house or dwelling as a metaphor for a period or state of the speaker's life: a domestic space that represents the speaker's emotional condition, with its features (cracks, walls, rooms) standing in for aspects of the speaker's inner world. Distinct from specific domestic-space motifs like Walls, Door/Threshold, Windows, and Bed, which isolate individual architectural elements; this motif covers the dwelling-as-whole-life metaphor.
The house carries the charge of the speaker's current life-state made inhabitable and architectural: its newness or decay, its cracks or solidity, tracking the speaker's emotional condition. The progression from one type of dwelling to another (house to tower, house to prison) marks transformation in the speaker's relationship to her own life.
Appears in 4 songs
“I thought my house was haunted / I used to live with ghosts”
The speaker's life or emotional condition as a dwelling filled with the residue of past failed relationships
“I was in my new house placing daydreams”
The house represents the speaker's attempt at a fresh start, a new period of life where she can heal and dream, but the progression from house to tower tracks how that hopeful space becomes a prison.
“To a house, not a home, all alone 'cause nobody's there”
The house-not-a-home distinction marks the speaker's domestic space as an empty dwelling rather than a lived-in home, architecture without warmth, possession without companionship.
“Pad around when I get home”
Home is the site of the speaker's most human, unperformed self, shoes off, padding around barefoot, pacing and asking herself questions about her life. The domestic space strips away the public persona and leaves just the woman dealing with her romantic failures.