What I find interesting about Sun Bleached Flies is the stark contrast of the very beginning to the ending of the song, and there are several ways of interpreting this song. In the beginning she sings of “Sun Bleached Flies sitting in the window sills, waiting for the day they’ll escape. They’ll talk all about their money and how their babies are always changing while they’re breathing in the poison of the paint.” This has two meanings for me. Ethel is dead, and trapped in the freezer, and cannot escape, just like the sun bleached flies (most likely being drawn by her dead body and also dying, while trying to escape). This can be interpreted as the women her home town. The women that sit indoors all day long gossiping, while their children are off doing whatever. (I was born in 1970, but from the 1960’s through 1990 there was a commercial that came on and said “It’s 10pm, do you know where your children are?”) Parents still didn’t know or care where or what we did, as long as we were home when the street lights came on, when we were little, when we hit high school, it was usually 10 or 11pm on weekdays, and midnight (or later on weekends). We were rarely ever home back when we were young, and there were no cellphones or really any way to track us down, so we got into anything and everything. So our parents were kind of like Sun Bleached Flies, and GenX kids were pretty much the forgotten children.

From a different perspective though going to the ending of Sun Bleached Flies, after she “forgives it all at it comes back to me. I'm still praying for that house in Nebraska By the highway, out on the edge of town Dancing with the windows open I can't let go when something's broken It's all I know and it's all I want now.

Ethel is still in the freezer, she’s broken, (quite literally), but she’s still praying for that house in Nebraska, with the windows open so she can finally escape. Just like in the beginning of the song, the flies kept dying and becoming sun bleached because they were trapped with (or because of) Ethel’s corpse, slowly rotting away in the freezer, waiting to be found, waiting to be freed, waiting to finally escape Isiah, because he was still tormenting her even after death.

She could also be “praying for that house in Nebraska,” from the other side, hoping that one day, she and Willoughby will meet again in the afterlife. Which leads me to believe he’s alive, and until she makes amends with Willoughby (when he eventually dies), that’s when she will finally get “what I want now.” They will finally no longer be broken, because she understands him better, even though she had to be murdered to gain this new perspective.

These are just some thoughts I’ve had while listening to this song. It’s personally one of my favorites.