| The Format – If Work Permits Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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To me, this song explores some of the difficult to express feelings of being in a failing relationship with someone who is pulling away from the commitment because of their fear of love, due to abuse from their childhood. The first part of the song is his prediction of what will happen in the future to this girl who will one day be alone and suddenly realize her mistake to have left him. She is at her dresser and she smells perfume and sees relics of their time together (jewelry, stuffed animal) and remembers the feelings, and then picks up the gold jewelry that he gave her, and realizes that she made a terrible mistake in leaving him. This is just his hope of what might happen in the future, but he knows it probably won't happen that way. He still hasn't let go. The second part of the song goes back to the time in the past when they were both together with all her family members (still engaged to be married, or in an obviously serious relationship with promise of commitment) and her family is grilling both of them about why their relationship is so screwed up. She is breaking off the relationship and her family thinks she is crazy, so they are asking him why she is like this and what he has done to contribute to her loss of trust. The last part of this thought "but that wind that blows across your room its gonna set the sails, and send me back to you" refers back to the first part of the song where she is at her dresser sometime in the future and he thinks that she might come back to him. He still is holding onto hope. The chorus of the song brings up the point that people often think twice about making serious commitments with relationships. He compares himself and his now "ex girlfriend" to sailors, looking for a place to anchor. But now that he realizes that it takes a lot more than he (or she) was ready for, he is just going to resign himself to making better use of his time as a single guy (on land). He resolves to drink less. Then, he makes a sarcastic expression to his family, that he is "doing all right". Given that he is afraid to tell them that his life isn't going the way he had expected it to, and he is likely embarrassed that he can't even stay in a serious relationship. The next part of the song muses about the reasons why the girl broke up with him. He doesn't want to feel like he contributed to her mistrust of love, so he recalls the reasons that she told him why she can't trust love or love deeply anymore. He recalls the story of when she was four and she had her first experience with domestic violence. Her father, who supposedly loved her and her family, beat up her brother with the phone receiver and left blood everywhere. Ever since then she has not been able to trust "love", and to her, "love is stinking cold, it's an inside joke". Love to her, always brought her back to the fear she felt at home. The final part of the song says that she is just as lonely as he is, and since he is back "on land" now and she is still out there in the water looking for a place to "anchor" (looking for another relationship to save her), he is just going to have to let her sink. Instead of trying to save her and help her love again, he is just going to have to move on and let her sink. This is a deeply emotional song, and essentially it sums up how he got to the point of letting go, and giving up on being codependent on his ex girlfriend. This is just my interpretation, based on my own life. I never understood this song until I went through the same thing years back. |
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