“What am I to believe? / I’m the balcony man.”
The singer’s opening question sets the tone; the non sequitur answer completes it. To be the balcony man is to be entangled in an existential balancing act, an attempt to break free of one’s constraints. This line is a kind of catechism, meant to facilitate an act of transformation.
Every movement that follows is an attempt at release: “I’m the balcony man, I’m Fred Astaire / You think I have a plan until I hit the stairs.” The promise of unrealized grace – of gliding effortlessly in dance – is obliterated at the moment of action, and this failure has real consequences.
You can feel the weight of it accumulating from verse to verse: “I’m two hundred pounds of packed ice / sitting on a chair in the morning sun.” “I’m a two hundred pound bag of blood and bone / leaking on your favorite chair.” The singer’s images grow heavier and more visceral. His attempted transformations take him further and further from his ideal. Transformation may require an act of faith, but no transformation can be completed by faith alone.
Still, with time and repeated effort, a change does occur. The singer is soon able to produce a simulacrum of a dance:
What am I to think on this balcony, Fred?Where everything is amazing that stays in bed.I'm a two hundred pound octopus under a sheet,Dancing round your world with my hands and feet.
The singer’s repeated attempts at movement drive this becoming. This isn’t the transformation he intended – though a two hundred pound dancing octopus may be an improvement over a leaking bag, it falls far short of Fred Astaire – but the ideal and the real have nonetheless fused into something strange, new, and surprisingly amazing. As the singer later concludes, “What doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.”
Critically, relief from this halting struggle to change can only be achieved by reckoning with one’s limits. The singer begins with an acknowledgment of his subjectivity’s constrained reach, repeated in a prayerlike chant: “This much I know to be true.” With each repetition, the scope of perception is rapidly narrowed, preparing both singer and listener for the moment of clairvoyance.
True release, however, can only come when the singer is able to transcend himself. In such moments, his limits and failures can finally vanish. When the focus shifts to his “languid and lovely and lazy” companion, all of the singer’s aborted transformations dissolve in her benevolent light. There is no longer any process of becoming – just the moment of being.
He offers up another prayer, this one to her, in the glorious, cathartic refrain:
This morning is amazing and so are youThis morning is amazing and so are youThis morning is amazing and so are youIn the morning sun.