Cover Me
"Cover Me" is the sixth track on Spirit.
Lyrics
I've been up all night
I can feel it coming
The morning light
The air is so cold here
It's so hard to breathe
We better take cover
Will you cover me?
Way up here with the northern lights
Beyond you and me
I dreamt of us in another life
One we've never reached
And you know we're sinking
We could fade away
I'm not going down
Not today
The air is so cold here
Too cold to see
We have to take cover
Cover me
We appeared with the northern lights
Beyond these broken bars
I pictured us in another life
We're all super stars
Dave's Take
Here is a video of Dave and Martin talking about this song:
My Take
Overall, this song gives me both Depeche Mode and Soulsavers vibes. Its use of a heavily synthesized bass line is typical Depeche Mode but the use of strings and the steel pedal guitar sounds more like something from Soulsavers. And actually, I don't know why this is because I don't think any steel pedal guitars were used on any Soulsavers songs. They have on one of Dave's solo songs, though! Anyway, this song has a very theatric and fantastical quality to it. And the lyrics sound very Bowie-esque, especially the "we're all super stars" line. The vocals end about little more than halfway through the song and thus we're treated to almost two minutes of the low bubbling of that synthesized bass and the continuing flourishes of the steel pedal guitar. Dave likes to say that songs take him to a very visual place. And wow...this song especially does that for me.
Music Video
The entirely black-and-white video opens on a street corner where we see Dave dressed in an astronaut suit. He is not wearing a helmet but is carrying one with him. He crosses the street to the other side where we see him walking along a narrow residential road lined with houses on each side. At the end of the road is a deserted beach with a bench overlooking it which Dave takes a seat on. He seems to be completely alone there. He surveys his surroundings and also looks up into the sky. The next set of scenes show him in outer space. In one scene, he is piloting a small spaceship, surrounded by a sea of stars and a bright sun in an otherwise black sky. In another scene, he is free-floating out in space. Back down on the ground where he is sitting on the bench and observing the sky, he picks up his helmet and puts it on, and then he gets up and walks out towards the sea.
My Take
This video has such a surreal feel to it despite all of the earthly surroundings like the streets and houses and the beach at the end. It also seems to be open to so many different interpretations, as well. I have a couple of them in mind, one of which seemed to be shared by others. One interpretation is that Dave (or at least the character he is portraying) really loves outer space and dreams of going there someday, so he goes as far as dressing up as an astronaut and going outside to fantasize about it, and that's what the scenes of him in outer space are- just his fantasies. Another interpretation is that Dave is portraying an ex-astronaut who is remembering his past endeavors in outer space. Both of these interpretations seem plausible, but what's interesting is also how differently people seem to perceive Dave's character's feelings in the video. Some have said that he looks sad or brokenhearted (maybe because of the accompanying lyrics), and his walking towards the ocean in particular brings about a melancholy mood. My opinion is that he actually looks content and happy. Whether I go with the daydreaming interpretation or the one about reminiscing about a past life, I think he looks happy thinking about space, and there even seems to be some feelings of longing. In this sense, this video very much reminds me of "King Dave" in the "Enjoy the Silence" video and how he quietly walks from place to place, enjoying the calm and serene settings around him.
P.S. Well, it turns out that I may be wrong on both of my interpretations above! According to Dave, himself, the song is about "a person who travels to another planet only to find that, much to his dismay, it's exactly the same as earth. It's a different planet but the same. He really can't get away from himself. If he wants things to change, he's going to have to implement it."1 It appears that this quote is more targeted towards the song lyrics rather than the video, but now I can definitely see that being a valid interpretation of the video, as well. For instance, the planet that "Astronaut Dave" sees when peering out the window of his spaceship looks kind of Earth-like, but in black-and-white, of course, it's really hard to tell if it is or not, and I don't really see any distinguishable continents on it. So, that particular image did have me puzzling a bit about whether it was really meant to be Earth or not. I also now understand why some people may have perceived feelings of sadness in "Astronaut Dave." Anyway, this is just the kind of thing that makes song and video interpretations so exciting and enlightening!
P.P.S. My second interpretation of Dave portraying an ex-astronaut seems to jibe with Anton Corbijn's interpretation, who wrote that