submissions
| Thompson Twins – If You Were Here Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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The song stars and ends with wondering what would happen "If you were here," presumably meaning that the person to whom the song is directed isn't present. I think the speaker went through a typically difficult breakup of a relationship--something, it appears, that has happened before ("I'll be always falling")--and is now trying to emotionally cope with the fact that another relationship has failed by painting it as something (like all the others) that never really mattered in the first place. Essentially, "If you were here I could tell you how much I don't like this relationship either and how unimportant it is to me, too." The person to whom the song is addressed, however, isn't there anymore--he or she is already gone. So the song thus becomes a self-address and a reflection on how this type of thing always happens--the speaker has these breakups and then puts up the wall of "I was never emotionally invested so it doesn't matter." At the same time, however, the speaker realizes that this part of his or her life will be always broken (cracked). He or she will spend time on songs like this which help to "repair" the pain of breaking up with someone by making it sound like no big deal, but the speaker realizes that "Just like the rain, I'll be always falling, yeah / Only to rise and fall again." I think, therefore, the final "Do not want a part of this anymore" isn't about not wanting to be in the original relationship that the first "Do not want a part of this anymore" refers to, but rather is a statement by the speaker that he or she doesn't want to go through this process of pretending not to be invested anymore. |
submissions
| The Goo Goo Dolls – Name Lyrics
| 18 years ago
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I think that this song could also be about reflecting on one's life from the vantage point of hindsight. I always imagined that the narrator was reflecting on a dream where his/her younger self encountered the older version of this individual. This is a song about uncovering the traumatic experience of realizing that you aren't what you wanted/expected to be: that those "dreams you never thought you'd lose got lost and thrown away." In a way, I think this is almost a "lost love" song to the younger self. After (re)encountering his/her younger persona, the narrator comprehends fully everything that has happened up until that point and what it all truly means for who s/he is now, in this moment. It almost seems like the song is tryign to prepare the younger person for a life that the narrator knows s/he can't prevent. In the end, the narrator knows that life isn't just "who we are" it's also what we do. The sad fact of the matter is that we can't hide behind antiquated versions of who we were or the values/morals we hoped to maintain. You can hide beside the facade of who you were in the past "maybe for a while," but the narrator won't "tell no one your name" because s/he knows that this better person (this lost person) is actually him/herself. |
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