For a while, this was my favorite track of the EP. It is truly difficult to articulate its implicit beauty, but I will try. Salvation is about self-destructive naivety. A song of contradictions, I am truly torn of how to feel. While it's clearly a tune of shattering innocence, it’s permeated with such beauty, I can’t help but feel the same naive enthrallment that the song describes. The first two lines are some of the hardest hitters for me:
I don’t really know why. Maybe it's because of the imagery. Maybe it's the physicality of it (personal tangent upcoming). Well, on deeper thought, I relate a scary amount; I’ve always loved the cold. In high school, I would walk my streets at night, barefoot and ungloved. I would return home with my fingers numb and my feet raw. The walk would be painful from the jagged asphalt digging into my cold-sensetized feet. This is also something I don’t really understand. I don’t enjoy the pain, but I guess it doesn’t affect me as much when it's paired with the cold. Because the cold is invigorating. The sharpness feels like proof of my existence. Here’s my own personal theory of this weird thing: I grew up in Wisconsin, where snow was a daily thing. When I moved at the age of 7 to Alabama, I felt like I was missing a part of myself. Because snow was magical… Anyways, this isn’t about me, at least not primarily so I will move on. (personal tangent ends!) I suppose my case is different from Ivy’s painted metaphor. Because I had seen the snow before. But I still understand the allure. In a way, our experiences are analogous even where they differ. To someone who has never experienced snow, it must be truly bizarre. A snowy landscape is a complete glittery transformation. And when your only exposure is through word of mouth and media, it becomes something mystical. Is a memory so different? A memory is untouchable, and it's a blurry something I don’t quite trust. Especially a distant childhood one. Similarly to “Salvation”, it tends to become romantic. And just as much as I would naively embrace a romanticized inexperience, I would embrace a romantic embodied nostalgia. Until my hands are red and numb.
The song contains, as far as I know, the most biblical imagery of any Ivy Knight song. As a non-religious person, I can’t say with certainty, but from my observations, the religious idea of “salvation” is usually eternal—there’s a sense of finality to it. It’s something you don’t have to consider the “after” of, because it, itself, is the final thing. This mirrors the idea of escapist idealism. It’s a fundamentally incomplete idea. It's viewed as a type of “salvation”, in that the ideal is flattened, flaws abstracted away into a sweet oblivion. We seek “salvation” in life, with the uncanny willingness to destroy ourselves in the process. But how often is “salvation” a truth? The things that we seek, at least the things that I’ve sought, tend to become less important after I attain them. And this seems to vary quite independently of how much I idealized the thing I got; much of the justification is often a lie. As with love, the “happily ever after” we envision has a deceptive “ever” which evades the usual fantasy.