Translation: No Fixed Abode, Jobless, Barely Making Any Money (Haruomi Hosono)

Here's No Fixed Abode, Jobless, Barely Making Any Money. If you asked me what song on the album is the most fun to sing along to, I'd be in for a week of mental turmoil, but this would surely wind up on the shortlist.

On early listens to Hosono House, I thought the songs in the middle of Side B (or maybe starting with Crossing the Winter) didn't stand out enough. The first four on Side A are real distinctive, as are the closer (The Rose and the Wild Beast) and coda (the opening bars of Sharing an Umbrella) — and Party is pretty special too, in its rustic minimalism — and you could definitely make a case for Fortune, Come In! Demons, Get Out!'s advance peek of the Tropical Trilogy — but it seemed to me that A5 / B3 / B4 muddied things.

The more I listened, the less true that felt, and it became utterly untrue once I worked out the lyrics, because every song on the album is touching and endearing in its own way.

In the lyric sheet it's a cigarette, not his own body, that the narrator wants ignited (fourth line of the first verse), but Hosono sings "body" (からだ). A bit of a Freudian slip? The narrator is so totally impoverished, and so cold as a result, that he feels he may as well be burned alive? In the words of Terry Pratchett, "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

But on Hochono House it's a cigarette again, as I expext it would have been in the unreleased '73 solo acoustic demo that inspired the Hochono House arrangement.

:::

Could you get me a good cigarette

and light up that bright red flame?

I feel cold down to my body's core.

Ignite my body with that fire.

Are there any offers on the table

too good to actually be true?

I have to find a treasure map.

It's the only hope I have left.

At this point, I'm like Captain Cook:

no fixed abode, jobless,

and to make matters worse,

barely making any money.

If my dream tonight's a good one,

then tomorrow, in the giddy deeps,

I'll have a chance encounter with an ocean goddess,

a la-la-landezvous upon the coral.

    Are there any offers on the table

    too good to actually be true?

    I have to find a treasure map.

    It's the only hope I have left.

    At this point, I'm like Captain Cook:

    no fixed abode, jobless,

    and to make matters worse,

    barely making any money.

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