So. Now that I've found my red long, lost iPod- You know the one- I'm re-rediscovering it.
It's like when you read a book as a child and it means so much to you then, but then you read it again when you're older, and it means something completely different but also so much more than it did before because you have that back ground of it meaning to you something then. (Breathe!)
Like layers.
Anyway. Ever since the Death Cab concert, I'm so INTO them. I mean.... I can. Not. Get. Enough of them. I'm in the middle of a desert walking for miles and miles and they are the freaking oasis.
So I was listening to A Lack of Color, and I remember loving the song, but because of how it sounded. I've decided to listen to all of their albums I have, and go through them word by word, phrase by phrase.
I would post the lyrics... Well... should I ? okay I will (Also, I'm sorry that I always post lyrics... it seems like I have nothing to say of my own, but, well, Ben Gibbard always says it better than I ever will)
here they are:
And when I see you
I really see you upside down
But my brain knows better
It picks you up and turns you around
Turns you around
Turns you around
If you feel discouraged
When there's a lack of color here
Please don't worry lover
It's really bursting at the seams
Absorbing everything
The spectrum's A to Z
This is fact, not fiction
For the first time in years
All the girls in every girlie magazine
Can't make me feel any less alone
I'm reaching for the phone
To call at 7:03
And on your machine, I slur a plea
For you to come home
But I know it's too late
I should have given you a reason to stay
Given you a reason to stay
Given you a reason to stay
Given you a reason to stay
This is fact, not fiction
For the first time in years...
This is where I got confused, or lazy... I didn't know what it meant really. So this is some guys response to it.
I think it's pure genius.
Pure beauty. Okay read.
"The whole song is a study of reality through the lens of opposites: inside vs. outside, fact vs. fiction, heart vs. brain. When looking at something, which view shows the soul or the truth of the matter, and which is just a shadow or filter of the truth.
In the midst of his loneliness in the aftermath of being left, he's perfecting his idea of what he had. He's longing for a perfection that he never really had. Is he longing for fact or a fiction he's created for himself?
The first stanza sets this up with the heart vs. the mind contradiction. The eye with vision (just like the heart with relationships) is the first receptor, the first judge. Because, it's first, is it closer to the original and therefore more true? or is the brain more true after it's had time to correct our eye's vision. Our brain tends to do the same thing to our heart after a while in a relationship. The brain is always catching up with our instincts.
By repeating "turns you around" several times, he's emphasizing that the brain does more than just a physical function of inverting an image, but the brain also locks onto the idea and dwells on it, dissects it, considers it over and over again and thinks it over constantly.
But is all that thinking and interpretation bringing him closer to the truth, or further from the truth. Did he really have a perfect relationship, or is he weaving a myth of perfection. Which is fact, which is fiction? The heart or the mind?
In the last lines of the song I think he realizes that he's longing for a false perfection. His reality is that he's alone now. That's the fact. The fiction is the relationship that's now over: they were together, but it couldn't work because it wasn't true. All the time they spent together was just a sham because at the heart of the matter it couldn't work."
Anyways. These are the times that I probably just don't have any original thought. Just when I think everyone else is a genius and has truth to say, because I'm a little burned out for finding it myself.
