Ocean Rain

Album: Ocean Rain (1984)
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Songfacts®:

  • This lushly orchestrated meditative ballad finds Ian McCulloch using nautical and meteorological terms as metaphors for the internal turmoil of someone caught up in a toxic relationship. The Echo & the Bunnyman frontman broods about a love so dangerous it leaves him "screaming from beneath the waves" as the hurricanes bring down "this ocean rain."

    Ian McCulloch admitted to Uncut magazine in a 2018 interview that he's been the cause of such a hurricane in many instances. "I've done this to so many people," he said. "The tide comes in, and it's lovely, then the storm hits. I've watched them drown and I've listened to them scream. I can't do anything about it."

    McCulloch added that he's just not good at human love: "I'm not good at saying 'I love you,' and vice versa. I don't want them saying it to me. Not too often. It's uncomfortable. My mum and dad, we never said 'I loved you.' And then years later when everyone started hugging each other, that was weird. I'm not good at that. I hate it. I think I like the idea of a different kind of love. A non-tactile love. Doing it through thought-transference. That seems to me to be a better way of saying 'I love you.'"

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