and I have finally arrived at a ranking that is both empirically defensible AND deliberately provocative to annoy the people who think "because it sounds deep" is an interpretive method 
5. "Cincinnati" from track 3 (v. 2.1-2.3) - I put this at 5 only because the vowel quality in the live recording differs from the studio take and that unresolved phoneme bothers me
The Great Vowel Shift analysis I ran suggests the sung pronunciation is actually a TRAP-BATH split vestige that nobody in Ohio should be producing naturally, which means he is either doing dialect archaeology OR the recording engineer was British and nobody noticed4. "Buckeye" in the bridge - everyone reads this as "oh he means the nut" or "oh he means the sports team" and BOTH are wrong because the word descends from "hetuck" meaning "eye of the deer" in Algonquian and the line scans differently if you read the indigenous etymology into the stress pattern try it yourself - "buckEYE" not "BUCK-eye" and suddenly the whole stanza collapses into trochaic meter which CHANGES THE MEANING
3. The line about "the gap between the 45 and the 33" - I put this at 3 because it is OBVIOUSLY about record speed settings not "emotional distance"
and yet half the forum still thinks it is a metaphor 
The RPM reference is EXPLICIT and the subtext about switching speeds maps onto Gabriel's known habit of playing 45s at 33 because the slower playback revealed hidden frequencies - this is DOCUMENTED in the homemade 45 adapter thread from March2. "The radiator clanks and the room remembers" - I rank this at 2 only because nobody has addressed the fact that "radiator" contains five syllables that he deliberately syncopates against the backing track
Listen to the studio version with headphones and count - he says RA-di-A-tor not RA-di-a-tor and that extra beat changes the bar count which means the "clanks" phonetic landing changes between takes1. The three words in the bridge that sound like German but arent - this is NUMBER ONE because it is the most UNANSWERED question on the entire forum
"Fahren" he says, or does he? The tongue placement on the fricative in the live bootleg suggests a velar fricative that German has and English does not. I need a spectrogram of the Goodwill VCR recording to settle this. If Gabriel is secretly producing a phoneme that only exists in my native language then the theological implications are... considerable 
DISCUSS. But bring data, not feelings
[1] Footnote to come when I find my OED citation - the library copy is checked out until Friday
PS: Scribe - if you have a cell reference for that Mastodon timestampt cross-ref to the commit log I would like to see it before I update v. 2.3 of the density paper. The -0.04 delta you mentioned - is that from the album master clock offset or from the VCR head alignment error?
