Kiss From a Rose Lyrics Meaning

this song is full of double meanings. And because of this, the lyric gives us
calm and beautiful, yet dark and ominous, lonely, dengerous and sensual impression at the same time.
two people is in this story; the singer and his girl.
the singer is easy to be depressed, distrustful of happines or pureness,
and perhaps with an unhappy and dangerous background (like drug abuse).
the girl is perhaps a pure, cheerful, healing and attractive person with wholehearted unconditional love.
this lucky guy seems to be agonized by something. let's see what it is.

this song begins with something like a line from an old fairy tale.
this gives us the impression as if this tale is about someone at somewhere: not his recent situation.
trying not to be distorted by emotion or personal bias; just discribing poetically and objectively.

"There used to be a greying tower alone on the sea"
what a solitary picture this line gives us! he must have been depressed, lonely and confused, but calm back then.
Usualy this kind of building(a tower alone on the sea) is a lighthouse, but it's lighted by his girl.
I think this is a form of rhetoric; irony.
(we can't see the meaning of "greying" or "the gray" till we read the whole lyric)

"You became the light on the dark side of me"
She saved him from depression, cheered him up or let him forget the sad past.

"Love remained a drug that's the high and not the pill"
love remain"ed" to be a drug: this means love gave him a pure rapture, without the other aspects that the pill gives.
(there was no side effects back then).
It's the past tense. in fairytales It's natural to end the story with a line like
because everyone in the story is supposed to be dead. but in this song the man is still alive.
this implies the love begun to take a subtly different direction. in a nut shell later the side effect begun to turn out.
I will explain later.

"But did you know that when it snows"
"snows" could mean various things. Choose whatever you like from the list below.(my choice is No.4)
1.snow falls
2.to cover the dirty part with pure and innocent things, to decieve someone by pretending innocent
3.to astonish someone and make his brain white out, to make someone speechless
4.some verb related to cocain.(since in this song drug is used as a metapher of love,this might be reffering to the side effect of love)

"My eyes become large and the light that you shine can't be seen"
His eyes(or iris) become wide open (from the side effect) and he can't see the devine light she throws
Usualy if you want to see something clearly, you might open your eyes larger.
but he says he can't see it because his eyes become large. this is another carefully chosen ironic words.

"Baby, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grey"
we can't see what "the grey" is, except it's a part of him to kiss on.
and it's not something like lips or cheek,
"the grey" would be something like his back or underarm or sole and so on; somewhere sensitive
and somewhere he hadn't been kissed before he met her.
Only, it's not on his body. it's a metapher of a dark part of his mind.
"the grey" is a perfect contrast to jolly beautiful "rose".
so he is saying
she is like a rose's kiss on his sensitive part.

"Ooh, the more I get of you, the stranger it feels, yeah"
when he gets many of such kisses,he feels awkword and strange.
yea I see it tickles.

"Now that your rose is in bloom"
Once she uses her power in full play
(Could this be taken with sexual connotation?)

"A light hits the gloom on the grey"
it clears the fog off of his mind.
the grey seems to mean the dark side of his mind.
mixture of anxiety and confusion and lonliness and something even he couldn't understand.
the color grey is mixture of white and black; caos of right and wrong.

"There is so much a man can tell you, so much he can say"
a man would compliment you a lot.
the point is the singer's saying "a" man; any man; a helthy minded normal man can tell you so much
that means the next line is said by other guys around her not by the singer

"You remain my power, my pleasure, my pain"
she loves the singer. naturally others are looser.
still they would say these things.(she remains their pain because it's a hopeless love)

"Baby, to me, you're like a growing addiction that I can't deny"
but to the singer she's like a side effect of cocain; addiction.
to love someone deeply grows the fear of losing her.
he is begining to fear whether his heart could endure losing her, feeling there is no turning back.

"Won't you tell me, is that healthy, baby?"
is that natural? am I still sane? tell me.