I'd say it's about escapism. The world described is stormy and vicious (birds thrown around, bullets for hail, yesterday's headlines blown by the wind), but something is calling you away- "Your voice is rapping on my windowsill" - could be a person, memory, anything.
Making your escapist rabbit hole is easy (Any fool can easy pick a hole) but to get there is hard. (I only wish I could fall in.) A scatterbrained person is not fully in the present moment, they're lost in their head somewhere ("somewhere I'm not"). The sorrow is at being unable to get there.
I always imagined that the voice rapping on the windowsill is the same as the unborn chicken voices in Paranoid Android, so, it represents inspiration itself. The song's about conducting lightning - being a conduit, channeling something powerful from the stormy world around but unable to get to manifest the place in your imagination (elusive, "a moving target in a firing range"). Fuses and powercuts all protect from too much power surging through a system, so, being shocked back to sober reality. Scatterbrain is a person who can't concentrate.
Here's what Thom said about it:
"It's a really, really difficult song to describe. My favourite type of weather in the whole wide world is extreme winds. It is a bit dangerous. I have a house in the middle of nowhere and the house next door, the roof blew up and we just watched it and it was exactly like 'The Wizard of Oz'. It was fantastic. And this was a similar incident in the city. But it's kind of a love song as well, in a way."
I'd say it's about escapism. The world described is stormy and vicious (birds thrown around, bullets for hail, yesterday's headlines blown by the wind), but something is calling you away- "Your voice is rapping on my windowsill" - could be a person, memory, anything.
Making your escapist rabbit hole is easy (Any fool can easy pick a hole) but to get there is hard. (I only wish I could fall in.) A scatterbrained person is not fully in the present moment, they're lost in their head somewhere ("somewhere I'm not"). The sorrow is at being unable to get there.
I always imagined that the voice rapping on the windowsill is the same as the unborn chicken voices in Paranoid Android, so, it represents inspiration itself. The song's about conducting lightning - being a conduit, channeling something powerful from the stormy world around but unable to get to manifest the place in your imagination (elusive, "a moving target in a firing range"). Fuses and powercuts all protect from too much power surging through a system, so, being shocked back to sober reality. Scatterbrain is a person who can't concentrate.
Here's what Thom said about it:
"It's a really, really difficult song to describe. My favourite type of weather in the whole wide world is extreme winds. It is a bit dangerous. I have a house in the middle of nowhere and the house next door, the roof blew up and we just watched it and it was exactly like 'The Wizard of Oz'. It was fantastic. And this was a similar incident in the city. But it's kind of a love song as well, in a way."