lyrics that mean something #1
In the spirit of posting more "bloggy" things, I thought about my lists of favorite or important songs that I've accumulated over the years. Will do more of these in the future and try to cover different topics of thought as they arrive. For now, here's a grab-bag of picks.
Foo Fighters have always seemed to me like standard radio dad rock. Not much has changed that opinion of them, having heard their songs too many times to really feel anything novel about them, but one day, driving home after finally getting a grip on longstanding mental health issues, I was in a somewhat delicate state of mind and feeling empowered and somewhat naive. “Reborn” after being so in the dark for so long.
Read the lyrics and understand how easily it spoke directly to me. I almost started crying when the first “I never wanna die” hit. For so long I saw no end to that tunnel and hearing that lyric, it hit me over the head, hard.
hello stranger - the fratellis
These are very pretty songs and have multiple, happier memories attached to them, but these are the initial thoughts I had when I first heard the album a few years ago. I used to know someone that I had first met during my tumultuous years. We were both teenagers when we had met and quickly hit off a deep friendship. As things go, we were both not mature enough to understand deeper feelings and our existing relationships clashed with our friendship. We would ebb and flow for a long time, going years without speaking, and then being inseparable once again.
Years after the fact, we admitted that we both had had feelings for one another once upon a time, but were never honest enough to speak or act on them. Their aunt (whom I still call my surrogate aunt to this day) laughed and said, “I wish you two would have seen yourselves then, like I always could.”
It was a disappointing, but somehow amusing, regret. It had validated a lot of teenaged angst that had long since faded away with time. But we laughed about that and I had thought that it spoke to the strength of our continued friendship.
Not that long after, and not that surprisingly, they once again dove head first into a whirlwind relationship and quickly abandoned our contact. There’s a sense of repeated abandonment there, something that has definitely crippled me in the past, but that I’ve also gotten over (and used to) in recent years. Sometimes I wonder if one day I’ll awake to another “hello stranger” message out of the blue, but I don’t think it will be nearly as endearing and well received as it had been for a long time. I cannot and will not humor it again. I have no desire to.
So the song now sits as a sad-happy hue pointed towards the future reminding me that happiness can and will continue to exist regardless of how things change.
These two songs will played at my wedding.
This was one of those moments that should have been a wake up call, but ultimately was one that fell on deaf ears. For a long time, I’d tell family and loved ones that I was just tired whenever they’d (frequently) ask me what was the matter.
These days, I’m just thankful that when I say I’m just tired, I’m just that. The lyrics saying that “my spirit doesn’t move like it did before”… phew. The whole thing reads like a copy and paste argument with myself and all of the thinly-veiled and unbelievable lies I told back then, both to myself and loved ones. Like a lackluster and cookie cutter template I would have used to avoid tough conversations.
Two prominent lines have always stuck out to me. “Don’t teach me a lesson that I’ve already learned,” and “I don’t want what you want, I don’t feel what you feel” - after a very stressful breakup, one that ended after a long time of trying to correct my mistakes and then reconcile differences, I felt these lines deeply. We had spent so much time going through all sorts of methods of discussing the frustration, tension, and lack of communication I had caused, and I felt that we had truly found communion and an understanding. After the fact, I realized that we were entirely not on the same page. All of those conversations and breakthroughs either weren’t received coherently, or my work wasn’t taken sincerely. All of my issues were again wielded against me and relitigated, ignoring the years of work we had gone through. All of my confessions and apologies were used against me. It was a relentless series of whiplash.
Regardless, after trying to make so many amends, I had felt that my own wants and needs in a relationship were being made out as being objectively wrong. We wanted two different things and if my apologies weren’t being accurately interpreted, then perhaps my reception to their “molding” is likewise wrong, but fuck it. I felt that I had ignored many important things when I was at fault, but then we finally addressed my shortcomings. I addressed my shortcomings. Once that had happened, I was then made to feel that I was a bad person and wrong for not wanting, for example, an open relationship. The only way to “fix” things further would be to soullessly go along with it. Where could you agreeably go from there? There's no happy medium available, a middle ground is impossible. So when we made the hard decision and moved on, we came to an understanding. One that became nothing but vitriolic on their part when I moved on myself.
Who knows. But the tone of this song, somewhat somber but also liberating, was powerful to me.
To round this out, and leave it on a funnier note, I have to mention this song. It has unironically found itself in my rotation again recently and its absurd darkness alongside poppiness makes it a favorite.
Way back when, in the end game of our video series, we spent a lot of time discussing the vibes we were going for, hoping to do justice for the finale we had so-long worked for. In one of the last episodes, we used a Cage the Elephant song during a scene where our boy is driving on a country highway, in delight and muted freedom, slowly coming to terms with the trauma and shit he's endured, and mentally preparing for what's to come next. That song was very popular during our early days and we had listened to it a million times, so there was a personal love attached to it. And the lyrics were likewise a deadringer for the plot and themes we had been working with.
I had actually taken the audio from a 2010-dated live performance of the song. I'm sure someone out there, as neurotic and inquisitive as we are, had discovered that easter egg by now, but if not, hey, there it is. That's not the studio track in the episode, but a recording that was contemporary to the birth of the project.
Anyway, this song that I now mention (HELP) was so very nearly the track we were going to use instead. It was my dark horse pick. I still go back and forth over whether or not it was the right choice, but using Cage is hardly a mistake. Pink Guy in a horror series would have just been a cherry on top, I guess.
How insane and goofy the song is against its own lyrics, also just brings a smile to my face, because it was very much a vibe of that season. I thought I had kicked drinking (and in turn, all of my problems), but there was still so much shit brewing and brimming under the surface that I would still have to deal with. Thinking about those bouts of manic depression allows me to now, looking back, humorously relate to the dramatic outbursts described in the song.
Once again, sometimes in the project we were barely acting, and sometimes life imitates art, yadda yadda.
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Re-reading this post, the only advice I have this time is, evergreen: do good things with great friends and get a therapist.