The love you feel you carry inside can be passed
“What guage measures miracles?
Whose heart beats electrical?
We feign sickness with our modern joy
Even Western medicine
it couldn’t save Danny Callahan
Bad bone marrow, a bald little boy
But the love he feels he carries inside can be passed
He lay still his mother kissed him goodbye Said, ‘Come back, where are you going to alone?’” by: Conor Oberst
So i was listening to Conors solo CD today, and it truly is amazing :] I thing that one of the songs that really stands out is Danny Callahan for various reasons. I spent most of my morning listening to Bright Eyes and Conors solo stuff. I wish I could I could get into his heard (as weird as it may sound) he’s such a brilliant lyricst… or at least ten minutes of his time would do too, I would have so many questions to ask.
But getting back to Danny Callahan, I remember watching an interview with Conor and he actually explained what the song was really about I found it to be very interesting
“I was walking to this liquor store and pharmacy in Nebraska with a friend of mine,” he recalls when asked about the song. “Suddenly, she was like, ‘Oh my God! Look at that old man sitting in that car, look at how small he is!’ Of course, when we got closer we realized it was actually a little boy. It turned out he was waiting in line with his mom to get medicine, and we were there to buy vodka or something. My friend started crying, and we just went home. It was just one of those life experiences that begs to be written about. It’s partly about Danny, but it’s also about whether or not you can transmit your experience of love to another person and whether that message remains intact when it arrives.”
And then as always I visited song meanings.net, a person there brought up a really good point. They researched the name Daniel Callahan, and it turns out that he was a medical ethicist who argued that there is a clear distinction between killing and letting die, for example, euthansia versus removing a respirator to let a patient die naturally. So I agree with that person I think that Conor uses “Danny Callahan” as the little boys name just as an example to show his ideas. He’s saying that “Danny Callahan“‘s mother decided to let him die naturally and that is why she “kisses him goodbye”.