This is a long post, but bear with me.. I’ve loved this song for so many years, and listened to it in multiple stages of my life. It doesn’t look like anyone’s posted anything about this song in a long time, which means most of us first interpreted it when we were kids - and our understanding changes a lot as we grow up. With Brand New back on tour, I thought I’d share my adult-viewpoint over -analysis of one of my favorite cynical angsty songs from my teen years growing up.
This is a long post, but bear with me.. I’ve loved this song for so many years, and listened to it in multiple stages of my life. It doesn’t look like anyone’s posted anything about this song in a long time, which means most of us first interpreted it when we were kids - and our understanding changes a lot as we grow up. With Brand New back on tour, I thought I’d share my adult-viewpoint over -analysis of one of my favorite cynical angsty songs from my teen years growing up.
I think the overall...
I think the overall theme to this song is that things are not always as they appear on the surface, and that the true meanings of things are often hidden away. The verses give multiple examples as outlined below.
There’s also a lot of double meanings in the lyrics, and references to the band being on tour, the writers relationship, and even references to religion and writing songs to reveal the “quiet things”.
WE SAW THE WESTERN COAST The band is on tour through the west coast, which sounds great and fun on the surface. Remember, these are East Coast kids probably seeing the West Coast for the first time while on tour for their earlier albums, and simultaneously writing songs for their future albums, like this one.
I SAW THE HOSPITAL He got sick and ended up in the hospital, which is not fun. What appeared to be great fun touring the West Coast, actually wasn’t all that great in reality since he was sick (this is the bad part that no one knows). Jesse’s dad was a nurse, so I bet he made him go to a hospital while on tour because he wasn’t feeling well.
AND NURSED THE SHORELINE LIKE A WOUND Double meaning here. 1) The band toured the cities on the shore 2) Going to the beach made him physically feel better, helped him “nurse his wound” whatever it was… physically sick or emotionally or both.
REPORTS OF A LOVERS’ TRYSTS WERE NEITHER CLEAR NOR DESCRIPT WE KEPT IT SAFE AND SLOW THE QUIET THINGS THAT NO ONE EVER KNOWS People thought that him and his girlfriend were having a passionate affair while on tour, and there were unspecific rumors about it… it seemed like they were… but in reality they were actually taking is slow to make sure they don’t get hurt. Again, their relationship wasn’t as it appeared, and nobody knew the real story. They just assumed a rock star must be having a passionate affair - in reality they were just normal guys, and in a normal young relationship, trying to take it slow and concentrating on music and the tour.
SO KEEP THE BLOOD IN YOUR HEAD This refers to not having sex. It’s an old saying that when you’re aroused, the blood leaves your head travels to other places… which also means you’re not thinking straight because the blood left your head. Again, they are taking it slow - so he’s reminding himself to not have sex. Others think this is about suicide… I don’t see that at all.
AND KEEP YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND Feet on the ground means your feet aren’t up in bed, having sex. Again, this is taking the relationship safe and slow. This was a saying used when girls or guys were in each others bedrooms - “keep your feet on the ground”, but is also a reference to saying grounded in life and in a relationship.
IF TODAY’S THE DAY WE GET TIRED TODAYS THE DAY WE DROP OUT As referenced above, they are keeping their relationship safe and slow… so if they get tired of the relationship, it’s no problem - they’ll just end it, no strings attached mentality. Or at least this is what they’re telling themselves.
GAVE UP MY BODY AND BED ALL FOR AN EMPTY HOTEL This is referring to being in tour again. He gave up his bed at home to stay in hotels on tour. Tours are also tough on your body, which is probably why he ended up sick and in the hospital. So he gave up his home and health to be on tour.
WASTING WORDS ON LOWERCASES AND CAPITALS This refers to either writing or singing songs. Capitals probably has a double meaning, because they tour through the capitals in each state… or at least the bigger cities. You can imagine Jesse sitting in boring hotels, traveling from city to city, writing song lyrics in his free time while he’s not feeling well.
I CONTEMPLATE THE DAY WE WED YOUR FRIENDS ARE BORING ME TO DEATH More examples of things not being as they appear. Their wedding day is supposedly exiting, but he’s secretly bored. This is all a theoretical story too - he’s imagining how their wedding day might be, if they ever got married, and probably talking himself out of ever doing it by thinking about it, or even being so cynical that he decides to break up because it won’t end well anyway.
YOUR VEIL IS RUINED IN THE RAIN I love this line - lots of meaning here.
1) Rain on your wedding day is symbolic of having kids. Since they are taking their relationship slow right now, he’s imagining them getting married, finally having sex, and getting pregnant and having kids, which is a blessing on the surface… but again the negative that’s not apparent is mentioned in the following lines. The quiet things that you don’t normally think about when you idealize marriage and kids.
2) This is another example of a quiet thing…. Your wedding day is supposed to be perfect, but rain on your wedding day is a classic example of it not being as perfect as it seems. Nobody imagines rain on your wedding day, but it happens often… so it’s poetic that this is how he imagines it in a song about the quiet things that aren’t as positive as people imagine them to be.
3) The veil covers the brides face, or metaphorically the truth about who they are. It puts a pretty cover over the truth. The fact that the “rain ruined” the veil means that it reveals the truth of the person or the situation… consistent with the song title and theme once again.
BY THEN IT’S YOU I CAN DO WITHOUT THERE’S NOTHING NEW TO TALK ABOUT AND THOUGH OUR KIDS ARE BLESSED THEIR PARENTS LET THEM SHOULDER ALL THE BLAME As mentioned above, he’s taking a cynical view of their potential marriage - they’ll probably loose interest once the “veil” is ruined, they have sex, and have kids. And when marriages with kids end, the kids often end up blaming themselves. If the kids are well off and seem “blessed”, but secretly hiding the guilt that they think they caused their parents unhappiness, then this again is a “quiet thing” per the song theme. This is a cynical view of a relationship for sure, but a reality for many people in a bad marriage or a broken home.
I LIE FOR ONLY YOU Another poetic double meaning of the word lie. In the first line, it’s straightforward - he “lies with” only her in the biblical sense (in the bible they use this wording to refer to sex.) After you get married, you promise to only have sex with your partner. This is the main point of having a wedding - to say you’ll only lie with your partner.
AND I LIE WELL, HALLELUJA This time, lie means to not tell the truth. He’s hiding his true feeling about things, and nobody ever knows, as the song title says, and also probably lying about the relationship, being faithful, being in love, etc. The juxtaposition between what he says on his wedding day, and the quiet things he thinks inside is another reference to the theme of the song.
Hallelujah may be reference to the wedding being a religious ceremony too, meaning he’s taking his vows, and secretly knowing he lying. Another quiet thing.
Hallelujah also means “let is be”, so he’s accepting that this is the case, and he can’t change it. He’s accepting that nobody knows the truth, and that he’ll just hide the way he feels forever about the quiet things. This is the reality of life from a metaphysical sense - nobody ever knows the real truth behind anything, only your own point of view interpreted by your experiences and opinions.
Adding to the meaning of this line, I think of some cheap hotel rooms that are particularly sparse - practically nothing in them at all. He mentions in the chorus an empty hotel while on tour, so I imagine he’s in a sparse hotel room like this, or staying in a series of them while on tour. Sometimes the only thing in these rooms is a bible in a drawer. If you’re depressed and feeling cynical, trying to be inspired and writing songs in a room like this, then I bet you pick up the Bible at some point, even if just briefly… maybe this long and drawn out accentuated line said repeatedly and very slowly is referencing that bible, the quiet thing in the hotel room - Hallelujah is so emphasized and even seemingly out of place in the song, like a bible being out of place in a crappy hotel room.
Hallelujah could also be a reference to a cynical view of the underlying truth to religion vs. the ideal surface viewpoint, going back to the main theme again.
This all might seem like reading too much into a single line or two, but think about the fact that this line is repeated multiple times and such a core focus of the song and that it’s so moving - it’s obvious that it was important to the writer.
Also interesting is that he sings this line twice, once low and slow, and then repeats it again an octave higher and shouting it. This is true Brand New fashion… they do this same thing in lots of their songs… but the meaning behind doing this could be:
1) keeping it safe and slow in the first repetition, and then going all in for the second, referencing the relationship mentioned in the song and jumping the shark from taking it slow to imagining being married.
2) keeping it quiet in the first repetition, but then shouting it the second time - meaning in reality you keep the quiet things quiet, but on the inside the truth is shouting at you. The truth is quiet on the outside, but loud on the inside.
3) It could be referencing that in singing this song and revealing the truth behind how he secretly feels, all the truths revealed go from being quiet on the inside, to physically being shared with everyone and shouted publicly through the song. Making your true inner feelings revealed and making yourself vulnerable is part of being an honest poet, and being in an honest relationship too… not to mention being emotionally healthy. So ironically, by writing this song, everyone does know the quiet things he’s thinking, and perhaps him being so vulnerable helps us all be honest about how we truly feel. I think this gets to the heart about why the song feels so heavy and moving, and so honest and freeing.
This song is absolutely about drugs (as are many of their songs).
This song is absolutely about drugs (as are many of their songs).
I read somewhere that crack was the inspiration of Breathe & Firestarter. Breathe is basically a warning & instruction manual about crack. Firestarter makes sense too, as does this song. Pretty simple.
I read somewhere that crack was the inspiration of Breathe & Firestarter. Breathe is basically a warning & instruction manual about crack. Firestarter makes sense too, as does this song. Pretty simple.
love looking at the old comments =D my fav song currrently
love looking at the old comments =D my fav song currrently
it's about us
it's about us
Mister David Byrne has said before that this song is about Norman Bates from Psycho, but I don’t see any connection to his mindset at all in these lyrics, and instead I had a very different and personal reading that I haven’t seen anyone get into before. To me, my family, and my friends, this song is one thing: An autistic meltdown caused by sensory overload as told from the point of view of the person experiencing it.
Mister David Byrne has said before that this song is about Norman Bates from Psycho, but I don’t see any connection to his mindset at all in these lyrics, and instead I had a very different and personal reading that I haven’t seen anyone get into before. To me, my family, and my friends, this song is one thing: An autistic meltdown caused by sensory overload as told from the point of view of the person experiencing it.
Let me explain myself, because some people with misconceptions about autism are going to assume I’m comparing being autistic to...
Let me explain myself, because some people with misconceptions about autism are going to assume I’m comparing being autistic to being a “psycho killer.” First of all, nothing wrong with being psychotic, the killer part is the problem, second of all David Byrne identified as autistic from a young age up until he was rich and famous enough to control every aspect of his environment so the more “negative symptoms” wouldn’t surface—his autism informs a lot of his songwriting, and third of all I am actually autistic and I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
It starts almost immediately in the first verse.
“I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax / I can’t sleep ‘cause my bed’s on fire / Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire”
This immediately rings true to me as a sign of sensory overload. Unable to relax, writhing in a bed that feels too hot and too cold and too hard and too soft, needing everyone to keep their distance. The way he says “don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire” speaks to me on a deeply personal level.
The second verse is the most obvious to me.
“You start a conversation, you can't even finish it / You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything / When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed / Say something once, why say it again?”
He’s stuck in a room with (presumably neurotypical) people making small talk. To some autistic people, even with very low support needs, small talk is agonising. It’s empty words that don’t communicate anything repeated over and over ad nauseam. You’re expected to have a specific answer to certain prompts, and if you engage too earnestly or don’t engage at all you’re seen as weird. Sitting in a room where this is happening is slowly overwhelming him and making him feel like he’s going to lose his mind, which is where the chorus comes in.
“Psycho Killer / Qu'est-ce que c'est / Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa / Better run run run, run run run run away” (as well as all vocalisations that accompany these lyrics)
When you are autistic, high masking (means good at suppressing your autism enough to appear neurotypical to an outside observer [this is not a good trait to have in many cases]), and having a moment of sensory overload you begin to silently panic. I’m not exaggerating. You go into fight, flight, freeze, and fawn simultaneously. Your thoughts become jumbled and frenzied and oftentimes downright mean in a way that does not align with your true personality.
I’ve asked my autistic friends and even my mother who probably has undiagnosed autism if this rang true to them, and they all agreed with me on this point:
When you are being overwhelmed by a specific thing, person, or group, you start thinking evil thoughts about it to express your distress. It’s not uncommon to think “If you don’t shut up/stop it/turn that off right now I’m going to finally snap and kill someone, I’m going to end it all, I will literally crazy murder you,” & then the actual thing that happens is you say “Hey, can you please stop chewing for a second so I can put my earplugs in? I’m really noise sensitive right now.” And then everything is fine.
“Qu'est-ce que c'est” could have a number of interpretations, my favourites are that the brain gets very jumbled in this situation, so he might be switching to French on accident—my mother does this sometimes, and she hasn’t spoken French since the 90s. Alternatively, taking the meaning of “basically ‘what is this’ or ‘what’s that’” (gonna have to trust my mother on that translation) it could be some kind of confusion about what’s even happening to him and why.
“Run run run run away” can easily be read as him warning others to run before he snaps on them, but it also makes me think of the urge to just get up and run out of a room that’s overwhelming me. That’s the “flight” response in action!
The vocalisations are amazing in this chorus, I can’t sing it without doing my main overload stim which is to shake out a hand in front of my chest. The “fa-fa-fa” part sounds like hyperventilating, the “oh, ayayayayay” part sounds like yelling to try and disperse some of the panicked energy, and finally the “ooh, hoo, hoo, hoo, hooo…” sounds like trying to full yourself together afterward.
The French in the bridge is the closest to being Norman Bates related in the entire song but I don’t think he’s thrusting himself to glory in that movie even in his own mind. That said, I don’t have an autistic reading of it unless French is a comfort language for him in which case muttering to himself in French could actually be a form of stimming. I do it with singing in Japanese because the consonants are so delightfully placed that it feels amazing in my mouth.
“We are vain and we are blind / I hate problem when they’re not polite” is probably the most straightforward thing possible. Humans are flawed, we make rules just to break them, and we’re unkind.
So that is my reading of the song and why it’s my personal autism anthem!
The way I interpreted this song was very much shaped by a particular person I was thinking of at the time, but I keep it in my head, and though I don’t think it’s the intended meaning, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read it the way I do.
The way I interpreted this song was very much shaped by a particular person I was thinking of at the time, but I keep it in my head, and though I don’t think it’s the intended meaning, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read it the way I do.
What I see is a song about someone who is desperately trying and failing to throw away the childish aspects of himself because he’s been stuck for too long not acting his age.
What I see is a song about someone who is desperately trying and failing to throw away the childish aspects of himself because he’s been stuck for too long not acting his age.
I interpreted “toy broken boy soldier” to mean something like “someone who grew...
I interpreted “toy broken boy soldier” to mean something like “someone who grew up acting disciplined like a soldier, letting himself be treated as a toy, until it broke him.” Again, I was thinking about a loved one (who has told me in depth about their struggle with an experience like this) when I had this association, so it made me think of the cycle of children forced to act like adults by their circumstances only to become adults who can’t escape their childish nature.
It feels like a problem to them that, despite the fact that they’ve grown up, they can’t seem to get rid of the aspects of themselves that feel childish. Sometimes it’s a genuine unhealthy behaviour, some kind of over-dependence on a perceived authority figure or extreme difficulties with confrontation to the point of reading others’ feelings as attacks, while other times it’s just liking to sit on a swing set or sleep with a plushie or ask for help now and again. Sometimes the thing that feels like a crime is having emotions.
“First Love/Late Spring” by Mitski has a pair of couplets about this that I think of from time to time. The first is “Wild women don’t get the blues, but I find / that lately I’ve been crying like a tall child” and the second is “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five / but now I find I’ve grown into a tall child.” In that song she describes being overly emotional in her eyes, crying easily, feeling like her chest will cave in if she doesn’t hear from the one she loves. She’s admitting and succumbing to the childishness she’s so ashamed of, while Jack White’s narrator has a much angrier approach. There’s something to be said about gender roles here, but I’ve gone long enough.
“Pulling my questions from the shelf” could mean he’s not making his questions available anymore (pulled from shelves = recall or something to that effect) and is trying to handle everything entirely by himself. Interestingly, he says “I’m going back to school today, but I’m dropping myself off” as if the childish part of going to school is being dropped off & not the age that schoolchildren are? Which I think goes to show that as much as he wants to act like an adult, the roles of adult and child have been so blended in his mind that he doesn’t know where to begin.
The last thing I want to touch on is admittedly probably a stretch but I thought it was an interesting way to read the verse.
“You're rifling through a box of toys That were handed down to me Just take all the ones you want and then Give the rest to my family”
This can obviously be read as his overzealous attempts to destroy the child in him leading to him getting rid of precious things—these sound like heirlooms, not a toy he got as a middle schooler and kinda liked but wasn’t that attached to.
But another way to read it, my “stretch before you reach” reading, is that the box of toys represents the circumstances that made him this way to begin with. A burden that was handed down to him by generations of trauma and immature adults. If you don’t take his burden from him, it will go back into his family and the cycle will continue.
So what I see in this song is a man who feels he cannot adapt to being an adult, and whose perceptions of the roles of adult and child are mixed up to begin with, who feels angry and broken and wants to forcefully fix what he perceives as the problem. He targets his dependence on others—he’s only going to ask himself questions, he’ll be dropping himself off from now on—and tries to discard everything that reminds him of his childhood, like his passed-down toys and his memories. His misguidedness leads to an endless cycle of child and man and child again, he never truly grows up.
Note: I'm talking about the studio versions lyrics, not the live lyrics posted here. I think this song is written about a breakup, months on, from the perspective of the rebound. Left alone in her room, he reads her diary and finds that all the things she says to him are the same as what she said to her ex. This is further supported by him prying about what she loved about her ex; "He's asking you why you loved him", where 'he' is the rebound and 'him' is the ex. Yet the girl can't reply, hiding her reasons in her diary...
Note: I'm talking about the studio versions lyrics, not the live lyrics posted here. I think this song is written about a breakup, months on, from the perspective of the rebound. Left alone in her room, he reads her diary and finds that all the things she says to him are the same as what she said to her ex. This is further supported by him prying about what she loved about her ex; "He's asking you why you loved him", where 'he' is the rebound and 'him' is the ex. Yet the girl can't reply, hiding her reasons in her diary because she knows she is just trying to relive what she lost with the rebound. When the rebound finds out he is livid "ripped page and petals, ripped to the blood" and he leaves her stating "But I didn't and don't want you ever to read, Any diary of mine and word I may leave now" meaning he doesn't want her to find the words he writes about another girl and look for herself in it as that would start the whole cycle again. Our rebound however still has the tug of curiosity; "Your diary, your diary, your diary, open and inviting me back", the repetition of this chorus would suggest that the cycle lives on in him. He's left wondering if she writes about him now, if he should get back with her as her diary is "open and inviting me back".
I first heard this song 15 years ago after I had mistakenly hurt a guy I had been seeing, because I felt hurt by something he had done. The words in the refrain: “you let loss be your guide” went nuclear inside of me. Such a common human misstep: I was hurt, so let me hurt someone. Loss as a guide, to me, isn’t meaninglessness, it’s tragedy. It’s preventable. In a very subtle way this song is largely and latently about abundance: our blindness to seeing it, perceiving it, remembering it, operating from a place of it. Our limited...
I first heard this song 15 years ago after I had mistakenly hurt a guy I had been seeing, because I felt hurt by something he had done. The words in the refrain: “you let loss be your guide” went nuclear inside of me. Such a common human misstep: I was hurt, so let me hurt someone. Loss as a guide, to me, isn’t meaninglessness, it’s tragedy. It’s preventable. In a very subtle way this song is largely and latently about abundance: our blindness to seeing it, perceiving it, remembering it, operating from a place of it. Our limited vision: the flashlights on a quiet deserted and isolated road at night. “The dawn to end all nights…”, the dreamlike and smoke-filled imagery of these isolated incidents in the video suggesting we experience and perceive events in a vacuum, which is a universal human trait; things being broken, lost, taken away, but the hyper-focus on these losses at the expense of everything else we still have… coming from a place of reaction rather than faith, of Absence versus Object Permanence…all these incidents and decisions and judgments being made right before things are about to change: right before dawn when it’s the darkest part of night (“come on and get your overdose” aka give up, “collect it at the borderline” ie right before the shift is about to take place)… perhaps the most prevalent and persistent and common flaw in our thinking: that the limited bit we see in front of us is all there is, and all there will be. And the terror and subsequent pain of acting from that perspective. This song electrifies, haunts, and energizes me all at once, every time I hear it. By focusing on what isn’t, it refers entirely to What Is. And that is what we can’t (or won’t) see.
It feels like the commentators haven't read the lyrics, honestly. In my opinion, if you take apart all the metaphors, all the meanings are clear. Monster I sing about sex, everyone understood that. But 'inflatable girl' is a comparison of a completely living person with an object of pleasure. This same person is called 'the girl of my dreams' in the lyrics, but 'the words in her head remain unsaid', that’s why she’s pictured as inanimate. The person singing doesn't seem to know her and doesn't really see her. Yet. But he wants to, this is sung about in the...
It feels like the commentators haven't read the lyrics, honestly. In my opinion, if you take apart all the metaphors, all the meanings are clear. Monster I sing about sex, everyone understood that. But 'inflatable girl' is a comparison of a completely living person with an object of pleasure. This same person is called 'the girl of my dreams' in the lyrics, but 'the words in her head remain unsaid', that’s why she’s pictured as inanimate. The person singing doesn't seem to know her and doesn't really see her. Yet. But he wants to, this is sung about in the first verse. In general, the song is about mixed emotions: the man singing is in love with the girl, drowns in the pleasure of sex with her, this makes him see her differently and fall even more under her spell, even though he barely knows what kind of person she is. It seems dreamy, heavenly, beautiful and complex. I, personally, think the song is f-ing sexy and deep. Hope you understand it and like it even more now heh.
It's about loving someone and trying to fight for that connection until they can't fight anymore. I think it's a song about deep feelings, no matter how it ends. Very sweet song.
It's about loving someone and trying to fight for that connection until they can't fight anymore. I think it's a song about deep feelings, no matter how it ends. Very sweet song.