"People have a tendency when they're outcast to become really angry and bitter, and that's justified. And what that song addresses, in a lot of ways, is when you start becoming angry and bitter--it's because you feel like that. I think the danger in that sense of being the black sheep is that you feel like you're the only one. Especially when you're really young, I think that's really common where you just feel like an alien and you don't really belong anywhere on Earth, or something.
And when you least expect it, there ends up being a whole clan of people, and where it came from is that feeling. The individual members of the band definitely feel like that...all alone. And as a band in the music business, we totally feel like that. "Floater" is what we're about as people. We can't get on MTV or the radio or anything. And that's not necessarily for lack of, I don't know, people thinking that we're any good or anything like that, but primarily because we're just sort of exiles in the land of popular culture. And I think a lot of people feel like that, but what you start to discover is...
Say you're a musician and you can't seem to feel like anyone is ever paying any attention. One day you look out and there's a crowd of people, and they all totally identify with you. And all those people identify with you because they all feel the same way, and there's a kind of cult... I mean, people like to call it Gen-X or the underground, or indie or punk rock or whatever, but it's essentially the cult of the minority. It's the outcasts. There's a tendency to feel like you're the only one, but you're not.
I had a weird series of dreams about these barbarians in an Arabic culture in the desert, and if you don't follow their god, or worship their idols or whatever, you're tossed out to survive on your own. And you think, my god, I'm going to die out here, and that's when you run into all the other people that were tossed out on their own because they didn't fit. The idea of the song was very much to me that if you don't give in to that anger and bitterness and that depression, but instead you carve and squeeze the fat from the land and you pull people together, you can come back and take over. And I think in a lot of ways it's sort of a mobilization song...you know, don't just sit back and feel pathetic. Love who you are."
Robert Wynia |
