| Forgetting Fiction – ISNTAYWIST Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I will begin by saying there is only one other person in the world who knows what "ISNTAYWIST" stands for, and - at least for now - I plan on keeping it that way. Basically, this song details the shitstorm of regret that people experience immediately after a breakup and how our minds are usually our biggest enemies in situations like these. A lot of times, people (me) have the tendency to obsess over someone they've just lost. This amount of stress, coupled with any preexisting anxieties, can cause your mind to paint these awful delusions and scenarios in your head, which can then force you to worry about the situation even more. I've found that with myself, the worst case scenarios are usually the ones that come to mind the easiest. There's some intentional ambiguity throughout the song with regards to the existence of another "boy" in the girl's life. Implications are certainly made throughout: "Her empty bedsheets talk about her" (i.e. She's not sleeping in her own bed). However, even in the first verse "Every now and then my mind sees awful things / Like how your boy he makes you happy" it's stated that this is the narrator imagining his own fears. The fear of being replaced by someone else is something that I'm sure everyone struggles with to an extent, and it's the dominant sentiment at play in this song. In essence, the idea of being replaced can do more harm to someone than actually being replaced - due to the constant anxiety that it could be happening at any given moment. The entire second verse is sandwiched by lines about drinking to cope with pain. "Shots are fired" is meant to have two meanings: 1) downing liquor "shots" and 2) firing verbal shots (insults) at another person. It's easy to FEEL like you hate someone after he/she breaks your heart, even if you know you don't actually hate them. The end of the second verse concludes with the realization that it took everything - the anxiety, the alcohol, the allowance of hatred, the "half a notebook" (which is a reference to my actual songwriting notebook) - for the narrator to arrive at his pithy admission: "I miss you." The bridge is pretty much a direct allusion to the bridge in Taylor Swift's song, "Enchanted" where she sings the same line "Please don't be in love with someone else / Please don't have somebody waiting on you" twice, and harmonizes the second repetition. I recreate it to better fit this song obviously, but from a technical standpoint, the pieces that make up this bridge are nearly a direct mirror to the pieces that made up hers. Finally: once again, the theme of holding onto someone who hurts you - whether intentionally or unintentionally - is prevalent. The first half of the outro details this conflict: "All my friends said "Live without her" / But it's my mind - not her - who's doing awful things" One reason many of us choose to hate former lovers is that it makes the process of getting over them and letting go of them more manageable. This line illustrates that, although the right thing may be to let someone go, the painful reality is that we often have to justify doing so ourselves. And even though we wish we could hate some people, sometimes we just can't. |
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| Forgetting Fiction – Doe Eyes Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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"Doe Eyes" is a song that I consider unlike any other that I'd written at the time. Lyrically, most of the songs on DWAEPS were built on wordy verses and the occasionally simplistic hook here and there, not unlike a series of poems with some acoustic guitar tracks behind them. I was more focused on telling a complete story with every track. With "Doe Eyes," I just sort of let go of the reigns and started writing the most natural sounding "radio" rock chorus that I could. Thankfully, I liked where it was going and just ran with it. Explicitly, the verses mirror each other in that they both convey the internal conflict of realizing that the "right" thing to do in a relationship might also be considered the "worst," or most difficult, thing to do. And honestly, what's harder then letting go? As a symbol, "doe eyes" are meant to represent the deceptively beautiful and innocent. This idea is reinforced in the bridge/ outro: "The secrets that we hide / Behind my back and your eyes" In the context of the song, doe eyes are symbolic of one's inability to "see" through his/her own idealized conceptions of a person they might love or otherwise have feelings for. The motif of sight is huge in this sense, as we are often more than willing to "see only what we want to see" in the people we love. The great tragedy here is that we almost always try and romanticize the people over whom we hurt the most. OTHER NOTES: - I came up with the title while Snapchatting a girl. She always made these huge "doe eyes" in her selfies. The actual term "doe eyes" was just something that I'd heard in TV shows and other music. - The phrase "cashed out" in the opening verse was inspired by a trip I took to San Diego with a bunch of my best friends after high school. We went to a casino and the machines would print out these "cash out tickets" to claim however much money you had made/ lost. I vividly remember looking at my cash out ticket that had read "$0.02" and realizing it was time to stop. In the song, "cashed out" is a reference to understanding when it's time to stop something - or in this case, to let go. - The outro line "From your skin to his bones" is a reference to the chorus in the song "Slow" from DWAEPS: "Why don't, why don't you know? / Without your skin I'm just bones" |
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