We Live Again

We Live Again is the fifth track on Mutations.

Description
This song appears to be about Beck's grandfather, Al Hansen. Al Hansen was a fairly well known artist, famous for his avant-garde performance art and his odd collages and sculptures. For example, he would use trash like candy wrappers or cigarette butts to make his art. Al wrote some notes for a retrospective about his art, that is now on his website;

"At one time, when Beck and Channing must have been eight and six years old, I gave each of us a plastic shopping bag and we scoured Sunset Boulevard from La Brea west almost to Fairfax and back again east to Yucca. The three shopping bags full of cigarette were all the art materials I needed. All I had to buy was glue. Using paper trash: tickets, receipts, labels, postcards, movie posters and candy bar wrappers was one thing. A big smelly shopping bag full of cancerous cigarette butts and burnt matches was so stinking filthy that one couldn't escape the fact that one was recycling garbage. It also slowly became apparent as I began to sell my work regularly that I was a successful alchemist. I was literally turning shit into gold."

Clearly, this had some influence on Beck's works, who instead of visual pieces, uses found samples/sounds/styles to make an audio collage. Al died in 1995, and sometime after that Beck wrote "We Live Again" as a tribute.

The first verse refers to Al's art ("sifted through sand and leftover nightmares...turns shit to gold") and his influence ("blows my soul crazy"), while the second verse seems to be about the artistic lifestyle that Al helped pioneer. The line "stink like colognes from a new-fangled wasteland," could refer to, using some wordplay, Cologne, Germany, where Al opened an art school. Beck also spent some time there as a teenager.

The bridge seems to be about art, analogized to love. "Let your wildernesses burn" and the result will be new and fresh This relates to Al's sculptures, which may have looked deranged, but were new, not cold and vacant.

Lyrics
These withered hands have dug for a dream

Sifted through sand and leftover nightmares

Over the hill, a desolate wind

Turns shit to gold and blows my soul crazy

The end of the end, we live again

Oh I grow weary of the end

Oh hungry days in the footsteps of fools

Gazing alone through sex-painted windows

Dredging the night, drunk libertines stink like colognes

From a new-fangled wasteland

The end of the end, we live again

Oh I grow weary of the end

Love is a plague in a mix-match parade

Where the castaways look so deranged

When will children learn to let their wildernesses burn?

And love will be new, never cold and vacant

These withered hands have dug for a dream

Sifted through sand and leftover nightmares

The end of the end, we live again

Oh I grow weary of the end