Walls
Walls as emotional barriers: the partner's refusal to allow intimacy or vulnerability, rendered as physical architecture the speaker cannot get past. Often paired with color imagery (gray, blue) to convey the mood of the barrier.
Walls stand in for emotional unavailability made architectural: the partner's resistance to the relationship given physical form that the speaker can see but cannot penetrate.
Appears in 4 songs
“Patching up the crack along the wall”
The cracked wall represents the speaker's attempt to separate from and seal over past damage, but the crack persists as a site of vulnerability where the past intrudes on the present.
“I stopped trying to make him laugh, stopped trying to drill the safe”
The safe is a metaphor for the partner's emotional closure, his heart or true feelings are locked away and the speaker has been trying unsuccessfully to break through.
“You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray”
Walls as metaphor for the male figure's emotional resistance and refusal to allow intimacy, his barriers against the relationship, rendered in the bleak, lifeless color gray.
“Walls of insincerity”
The walls here are not a partner's emotional barriers but the social barriers erected at a party, the false faces and empty interactions that the speaker encounters before the stranger appears. Uncle Jerry connects this to Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall' and the idea that all people build walls to protect themselves in social settings.