LCD Soundsystem / Sound of Silver / 2007
Someone Great
muted, stunned, quietly devastated beneath a deceptively bright surface
A deceptively upbeat, xylophone-driven track that turns out to be about receiving news of a death and moving through the numb, mechanical days that follow. James Murphy uses plain, almost clerical language to describe grief's disorientation rather than its drama, letting the arrangement's warmth sit against the coldness of the words.
grief and loss emotional numbness time and mortality difficulty of communication the ordinariness of catastrophe
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing someone who has died, recalling their relationship and the moment of hearing the news; the address later widens to include a third party (a wife), suggesting the deceased is being introduced or re-explained to someone else. The voice is reflective and restrained, more shell-shocked than eloquent.
What happens
The song opens mid-conversation with someone the narrator can no longer speak to, then flashes back to small domestic memories and arguments. A phone call interrupts sleep and the narrator immediately senses bad news before it's confirmed. The following verses catalog the strange, almost insulting normalcy of the world afterward -- nice weather, ordinary coffee -- and the press of unfinished obligations. A long instrumental/mantra section about time relentlessly passing separates the verses from a final turn where the narrator reintroduces the dead person, oddly, to someone else, before the song collapses into the bare repeated fact of the loss and a fragile acknowledgment of survival.
How it's built
Verse-heavy and cyclical rather than driven by a conventional chorus. The song repeats its opening verse verbatim later, framing the whole piece as a loop the narrator can't escape. A extended vamp on a single repeated phrase about time passing functions as the emotional pivot, using accumulation instead of a bridge. The final section drops nearly all lyrical incident for a stark, chant-like repetition of the title phrase, ending in a short, quiet coda.
Section by section
Opening verse
“too late for beginnings”
The narrator addresses someone directly but immediately concedes the impossibility of that conversation. The admission that new relationships can't replace this one, paired with the phrase about beginnings arriving too late, suggests the person being spoken to is gone rather than merely absent.
Second verse
Small, tender memories of domestic friction are recast as valuable now that they're unavailable. The nostalgia is understated, avoiding sentimentality by focusing on mundane specifics rather than grand declarations of love.
Phone call verses
The narrator describes waking to a call and sensing wrongness before any words are exchanged. This section externalizes anticipatory dread, and the vagueness about what's actually said mirrors how shock erases detail from memory.
Weather and coffee verse
“stunned, it's not raining”
The disjunction between internal devastation and external calm is rendered through banal sensory details, dramatizing how grief makes the ordinary world feel absurd or insulting.
Work and unfinished business verse
A shift toward practical concerns -- deadlines, plans, songs -- suggests the narrator retreating into obligation as a coping mechanism, while also gesturing at the songwriter's own unfinished creative work as a possible layer of self-reference.
'Keeps coming' vamp
This extended repetition abandons narrative for pure rhythmic insistence, embodying time's indifferent forward motion. Its eventual halt mirrors the abrupt, singular stop that death represents.
Return of opening verse
Repeating the first verse verbatim reinforces that the narrator remains stuck at the same unresolved point, unable to progress past the initial shock despite everything described in between.
Wife verse
“smaller than my wife imagined”
This puzzling image suggests the narrator is now describing the deceased to someone who never met them, collapsing time further and implying the loss occurred long enough ago that new relationships have formed around its absence.
Title chant and coda
Stripped of imagery, the final repeated phrase functions as blunt acceptance rather than explanation. The closing acknowledgment of safety, delivered quietly, suggests survival rather than resolution -- the living going on, provisionally, in the aftermath.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated structure of 'and it keeps coming' builds a sense of relentless, indifferent time passing, mimicking grief's refusal to pause for the mourner.
- understatement
- Details like ordinary weather or coffee are described almost dismissively, which paradoxically intensifies the sense of shock and disconnection from normal life.
- in medias res opening
- Starting mid-thought, as if resuming an unfinished conversation, immediately establishes the unbridgeable gap between narrator and the person addressed.
- repetition as erosion
- The final chant of the title phrase strips the song of narrative detail, reducing it to a bare, exhausted statement of fact.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a fairly direct account of losing someone close through death, likely a parent given widely reported biographical context about Murphy's father, with the wife detail marking a later point in life when the deceased is being explained to someone who never knew them. An alternative reading treats the 'someone great' more abstractly as any significant relationship ended irrevocably, with death functioning as a metaphor for permanent separation; the lyric's ambiguity about cause of death supports this if one prefers not to import biographical assumptions.
Context
LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy has spoken in interviews about this song relating to the death of his father, though I can't verify exact quotes or dates, so this connection should be treated as plausible context rather than confirmed fact. The track appears on 2007's Sound of Silver, an album broadly concerned with aging, mortality, and time's passage, themes that echo this song's central image of time relentlessly 'coming' until it abruptly stops.
Listen for
- The gap between the bright, almost cheerful arrangement and the bleakness of the lyrical content
- How the repeated opening verse creates a sense of being trapped in the same moment of shock
- The shift from concrete domestic memory to abstract, chant-like repetition in the second half
- The odd, destabilizing detail about a wife's expectations, which recontextualizes the timeline of loss
- The quiet, provisional note of relief in the song's final line
About LCD Soundsystem
LCD Soundsystem is an American dance-punk revival band from Brooklyn, New York, formed in 2002 by James Murphy, co-founder of DFA Records. The band comprises Murphy, Nancy Whang, Pat Mahoney (drums), Tyler Pope, Al Doyle, and Korey Richey.
2001 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue