| Ellie Goulding – Wish I Stayed Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I think this song is about childhood memories of a place someone left behind in a careless moment wishing for something better. To me the first verse is talking about how people all think and speak differently, expressing a range of views which allows changes to happen over times. It’s also saying that no matter how much people may want time to move forward away from the past, and from their origins (roots and ‘feilds they grew from’) they will always wish to be brought back because life is tiresome and fearful. Tiresome in the way that life is much harder as you grow older and fearful in the way that the future creates more fear than past because in the past, everything has already happened whereas in the future anything can happen — It is unknown. This represents the climb forward only to want to attempt to fall back in time to when it was easier. (‘Can you get up right now, endeavor to freefall.) So go ahead and fall if you wish and although you treasure the thought of returning to the good times, how much of the future are you willing to lose by taking your life backwards ('its just a matter of how far'). This part of the song (and the chorus as well) represents how wanting more just takes you in a circle because when you are in the early stages of life, you wish it to move forward to better places (carelessness of running away) but as you grow older you want to follow the rose-tinted memories back to when things were easy. But if you were to always be travelling back and forth through your life, switching between old memories and places, and wanting to hurry up your life, you can pretty qucikly lose your bearings (‘you’ve forgotten where you are’) and ‘your mind will be found wondering around’ between times and ages. To me it seems obvious that the chorus is referring to a youth’s mistake of running away, wanting to escape childhood past. The way that the ending of that last verse and the chorus are linked (Wandering aroud with skipping ropes...) suggests at the journey between past and future and how life goes round in circles. The line that follows, ‘The crafty smoke that made us choke, but we didn’t give up hope’ is an interesting one. It implies that although moving away from bad memories and regrets seems like an intelligent (one definition of crafty) and a creative (another deifnition of crafty) thing to do, they were decieved by the ‘smoke’ that clouded their decisions, and were ‘choked’ as they realised that they’d made a wrong move in running away carelessly. And now they wish they’d stayed. The second verse is quite dificult to make sense of. ‘Patterns arranged in my background’ could refer to how memories form always at the back of her mind. The second line could represent how this new region of life, so far away from the home town, is hard to maintain and keep stable. It could be talking about how people who move away wish to make some form of communication (e.g, writing a letter) with their old connections but sometimes cannot find the words to say and ‘instead of words this paper so deserves’ draw ‘triangles’ and ‘patterns’ with the thought of ‘background’ memories constantly on their minds. ‘I don’t own my clothes but I own my mind’ is quite confusing but could refer to how all people always own in life is their mind. Because it is the one thing in life that you cannot move away from. Your mind cannot be lost (as in physically detached from your body) and its not important what ‘you’ve lost’ but its what you find in life by moving on and trying new things, or deciding to move back to old things. The whole song is basically referring to how people want to move on or move back and can’t decide where they want to be in life and eventually ending up going around and around in circles. Absolutely love this song. |
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