Benson Hedges

I think the song is about looking for meaning in all the wrong places. In the opening line, "if the Lord is gonna find me he better start looking today" is a backwards. You find the Lord, he doesn't find you. The narrator is just sitting back and waiting for meaning to find him instead of seeking it.

The line "Believing the motel TV would bring me to safety, But between MTV and Mr. O'Reilly I've come to find, that I can't be defined" is also pretty messed up if you think about it. He's placing his hopes on a motel TV, and then he watches two of the most vapid things ever placed on television (MTV and Bill O'Reilly) and when those don't draw him in he gives up and decides that no one will ever understand him.

The other line I'm basing this on is when he's talking about the birds and says "I think they come for the cold." Birds don't come for the cold, the fly away from the cold. The line makes no sense until he says the same thing about the sun. Well the sun kind of does come for the cold, in a sense. The sun comes when you're at your coldest to warm you up. Which is a very self centered way of explaining the sun's orbit. Going back, that means the narrator thinks that the birds came "for the cold," i.e. they came to help the narrator when he was at his coldest. But birds will never do that, because they're cold themselves. The narrator is self-centered and expects others to go out of their way to help him because he's unwilling to help himself.

This interpretation makes for a very different reading of the last section of the song, "They think I'm beautiful for all my big mistakes." It's a very beautiful sentiment, but at the same time it's unreasonable to hope for. I think just like in All the Pretty Girls and At Least I'm Not As Sad, we're not meant to take the narrator at face value. No one will ever love us for all our worst qualities. We have to take it upon ourselves to become better people.