"Soul Tattoo" Is A Problem For Constantine

I was listening to VAST's Tattoo of Your Name yesterday, and not for the first time, I wondered if the man in the song is really crazy or not.

In the song, he's convinced to kill the abusive husband of a woman he loves (to the extent he has her name tattooed on her soul), only to find himself arrested afterward, with the now-widow disavowing any knowledge of the scheme.

Or so he says. We only have his word that she told him about an insurance policy taken out the day before, and shouldn't that raise some alarms? It turns out there is no insurance policy, which makes sense. You take out a policy and he's murdered shortly thereafter? Yes, I'm sure the police wouldn't have found that suspicious. She could have lied about it, or he could have made it up in his own mind, which might explain why it didn't give him pause*, as his brain supplied the reasons why that wasn't a bad idea.

Also, they would supposedly flee the country for awhile until things calm down. I was under the impression that would also raise police suspicion, so unless they plan to head for a country with no extradition treaties, and thought they could make it out of the country before the cops got wise, it's not a very good plan. Again, could be her setting him up, could be his fevered mind creating its own implausible scenario and convincing him it is plausible.

Even in as he tells it, she only tells him to make her husband 'go away', which could be her protecting herself, or could be him misinterpreting it. We have no clue who the singer is or what he does, so maybe he could have scared the husband off.

One of the things I find telling is he refers to her crying twice, and there's no suggestion they're false. Once he calls to 'give her the signal as she cried', the other he describes the courtroom as 'filling with her tears'. Which gives me the impression that there was no collaboration, though he certainly thought there was, and she is genuinely grieving over her dead husband. We could question why she'd grieve over someone who apparently beat her**, but that isn't as uncommon in this world as we might like

Right to the end, the singer is convinced he was played for a sap, that she knew how infatuated he was with her, and used him to set herself free, but he wouldn't be the first person with a fixation on someone that wasn't returned, who feels betrayed as a result.

The music and the singing both increase in volume as the song progresses, though the singing does so more abruptly. His voice rises pretty sharply about the time she calls the cops on him. The other thing I notice is the music starts as just a guitar, but once the story progresses to the point where he's describing their plan (the insurance policy and fleeing the country), other instruments start coming in. First it's drums, then by the time he buys a gun it sounds like a tambourine. I think another guitar (or maybe a fiddle? I don't know instruments) cuts in as a backup when he actually kills the guy. It has the echoing aspect to it, like he's telling the story from his empty cell. The added complexity of the music makes me think it's all this elaborate fantasy he cooked up, and the downward spiral it puts him into. Or it could be her duplicity, what seems like a simple "kill my husband and we'll run away together" turns into "kill my husband, go to jail, and I'll run off with the money".

* The brain can come up with some impressive solutions to its own problems. In her later years, my grandmother thought my grandfather was still alive (dead for 3 decades by this point), even though he was never home. When wondering aloud where he was, she'd decide he must be working a night shift or staying with some friends who lived near a lake. Some part of her knew the truth, but since she couldn't admit to it, her mind concocted a scenario that sounded plausible so she wouldn't worry about his absence.

** The bruises could be something she faked, or something he imagined, or even saw and misinterpreted. I tend to think there were bruises, the narrator saw them, and made his own decision to act.