Thank you for your comments. I don't feel so alone. I can't understand why it pains me almost more than anything I have ever read or heard. Can't explain it. Isn't there some kind of saying about women's tears? I wish I could remember it. Oh, well. I am old. A lot gets lost.
Underneath is primal for me. It pulsates in a ryhthmn of strength and vulnerability - the rhythmn of being human.
Its starts on a lonely and tentative note. from which he reaches out to the Other, to another human being. Gently as an angel might - even though he is speaking about something so big, the lies that are so devastating.
But then he goes right into the pain.of it.
The image of everyone talking about the freak: "the outcast",
he outcast is turning back to look into the eyes of those that left him behind and saying let me take you underneath
Then that moving line :
baby better watch your step
The tone he uses in those lines - its so layered and what it perfectly conveys is a mixture of bitterness and mocking and pride and hurt and yearning and strength.
The yearning and pain becomes bigger in "never mind whats on the left" - so beautifully obscure that line, telling you, to obscure the heart, but underneath asking you not to listen to that instruction ever.
And then the chorus comes like a vast wave of revelation and un-recountable pain. That line black and blue sky" - its the endless sky of pain.
and when he sings the depth of my sin. it just kills. In that moment he shifts his point of view into the gaze of those who have condemned him, and then he sings
look at me, now do you see?
thats 180 degrees back to his own point of view, his own inescapable truth.
He creates a circle between himself and the other and expresses
that primal human yearning in all of us: to be Seen and Loved by the another.