Off The Record - My Morning Jacket: An Observation

For the uninitiated: Off The Record is a song in My Morning Jacket's last album, Z.

I seem to have a knack for recognizing English when spoken backwards. I guess repeated viewing of 'The Exorcist' was the cause for that. Anyway, I've never been wrong in recognizing it. Except for that one time when I thought the lead singer of Sigur Ros was actually a woman singing in English, but backwards. It was just that one time.

Coming to the topic at hand - I recently acquired the aforementioned album, and happened to notice that this particular song had instances of English spoken backwards, towards the end of the song. Tried Googling it, but surprisingly, nobody else seemed to have noticed that. Even lyrics sites didn't mention anything about it; they just had the main song's words.

I had my doubts. Perhaps I just made another mistake. But I had time. Lots of it. And also some version of Audacity(an audio editor). It's pretty fast when it comes to reversing songs. Soon I found myself listening to the singer speaking random English words, or that's what I thought it was. The music was louder than the singer's voice during that part, so I couldn't make out much of what he was saying. Some of the phrases I happened to hear were - "Here's a clue", "Burn burn burn" and "Oh my Jesus", not in that order. Reminded me of an episode of 'The Simpsons', the one where Bart forms a pop group that sings "Ymra eht nioj", which is "Join the army" spelt backwards. So, I'm going to make a totally misinformed and probably wrong statement - My Morning Jacket is a band that spreads anti-Christian thoughts through subliminal messages in their songs. Clever chaps.

In other news, I was listening to my copy of Radiohead's 'Pablo Honey' in the living room for change(I wanted to know how they sound on 5.1 speakers), when my mother came in shouting "What happened to the speakers?! Those noises sound like a mixie's!". She was referring to the distortion guitar riffs in 'Creep'. Sigh...