What does Home by the Sea mean?

Genesis: Home by the Sea Meaning

Tagged:   No tags, suggest one.
Album cover for Home by the Sea album cover

Song Released: 1983


Home by the Sea Lyrics

nice work

  1. 1TOP RATED

    #1 top rated interpretation:
    anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Mar 17th 2011 !⃝

    A burglar breaks into a house. The ghosts of people who have come before him appear, and force him to sit down, sit down, sit dow-ow-ow-own. They tell him their stories. He will never leave, and will eventually become one of them.

  2. anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Aug 26th 2018 !⃝

    Always thought it was about a retirement home. In thier minds theyre escaping but really just trapped. Pieces dont fit anymore due to dementia. Brilliant song.

  3. anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Sep 20th 2017 !⃝

    This is why music is awesome it could be about anything we interpreted from our own experience. It can be about anything. I can relate it to addiction.

  4. anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Aug 29th 2017 !⃝

    An abandoned psychiatric hospital where the souls of the victims of lobotomies and electric shocks and the other horrors of that field linger on stuck to the place by the shock of betrayal.
    The Hospital is long abandoned but the spirits of those victims linger on stuck in the place, hungry for life that they knew before the torture and painful deaths.
    The burglar breaks in looking for loot, and becomes lost in the weight of the need of the souls still imprisoned to feel and know the life of a new member to distract them from the hopelessness of their timeless nightmare.

  5. anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Sep 11th 2014 !⃝

    I have always thought of this song as an Armageddon type song.
    Scripture I believe in Joel 6 in the Bible it references about intruders shimmying down the wall. Message seems to be horroring of being on guard and ready. It seems like a prophecy and look at the way the world has become since the 80's.
    Love this song!
    Kate

  6. anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Aug 8th 2013 !⃝

    I've heard that it was about the denizens of a retirement (make that a nursing) home. It makes sense when you consider the lyrics. These are old people with nothing left to live for. They want to "relive" their lives "in what we tell you."

    Have you ever gone into a nursing home and felt how desperate these people are to cling to anyone that smacks of life, youth, and vitality? How desperately they want to be heard, to be noticed again? How desperate they are to have a captive audience-even if it is a total stranger! And to have someone else to live vicariously through. Or, as the song implies, to have a chance to re-live their own lives through the telling.

    There is also a lot of mockery in the phrase "Welcome to the home by the sea." It reminds me of the way the staff in such a place will put on a phony, smiling front and pretend to your relatives that this is just going to be the greatest place in the world to live. A dream retirement "down by the sea." But in reality, it's a lonely and hellish nightmare, and the people are looking for any thing that gives them a sense of momentary escapism-mostly through reliving their pasts

  7. anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Feb 5th 2013 !⃝

    What came to mind was that it described the penitentiary of Alcatraz, the home by the sea.

  8. anonymous
    click a star to vote
    Oct 30th 2012 !⃝

    Burglar? Dickens? Come on, folks. Don't be so literal. Ancestors, habits, sins of the father... Sins of the son. It's about life.

  9. DiaRoot14622
    click a star to vote
    Jul 9th 2011 !⃝

    Funny, I never got the bugler, I always thought of the Dickens lessons on the X-mas past. The main character is trying to sleep and the shadows become alive and attempt to make him aware the consensuses or debts of our present may haunt us much longer than we think...


More Genesis songs »


 


Latest Articles

 


Submit Your Interpretation

[ want a different song? ]




Just Posted

Rock Show anonymous
Don't Go anonymous
Tek It anonymous
Taking Over Me anonymous
All The Good Girls Go To Hell anonymous
Wingriddenangel anonymous
I Spoke to The Devil in Miami anonymous
This Woman's Work anonymous
Action! Not Words anonymous
Everybody Loves Me, Baby anonymous
Fall in to Sleep anonymous
Lemon Boy anonymous
Drama Club anonymous
Gravity anonymous
Our First Time anonymous

(We won't give out your email)