| Bastille – Four Walls (The Ballad of Perry Smith) Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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In interview, Dan Smith said "I was really taken aback by 'In Cold Blood' by Truman Capote, when I read it a few years ago, and I guess the song just sort of came out of that. It’s one of the older tunes on the record. Actually, the guitar solo at the end Will recorded on a tour bus in Germany maybe two years ago or more. Since then, Serial happened, and Making a Murderer and there’s this fresh advent of true crime in culture being like a massive deal, and I found that really interesting. So we then put in, got a friend to put in a little quote at the end that says, “This is a collect call from the prison” just as a kind of nod to that, because I did think it was interesting that we had this song which is about the first wave of true crime fiction. I guess the song’s another super-happy Bastille song that looks at dark subjects. It very loosely looks at kind of capital punishment and how weird it is, and two wrongs don’t make a right and all that kind of stuff". |
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| Bastille – Send Them Off! Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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In interview, Dan Smith said "“Send Them Off!” I guess is a kind of, it’s a song of irrational relationship jealousy told very dramatically by the language of Desdemona in Othello, which is such a famous, classic jealousy narrative, but using some of the imagery from The Exorcist. So I guess it’s kind of quite symbolic of how we write, and how our music comes out as sort of moments that are like little scenes in themselves but via all these references that we have and nods towards things that we like and enjoy and just try to tell things in a slightly different way". |
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| Bastille – Blame Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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In interview, Dan Smith Said "“Blame” is like a super simple snapshot of two gang members, one of whom is pissing the other one off, and it’s in that moment before pulling the trigger, It’s the snapshot of that, and we wanted to use imagery from The Godfather and from American History X to just create this brooding, mean snapshot into these two people’s really extreme emotions in this little fictional narrative. So yeah, it totally leans on the familiar within those situations to try and take you as a listener to that place immediately. I think as well just the feel of the song, it’s got that mean, dramatic lean to it". |
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| Bastille – Fake It Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| "It" being the sound bite at the beginning | |
| Bastille – Fake It Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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In an interview, Dan Smith said It’s from the old documentary about relationships, and it’s about a couple in therapy working through those issues. It sounds like such an old clip; I love that as well. I guess the song sort of looks at how people fuck up all the time, but sometimes it’s easier to keep something going because more of it makes you happy and more of it’s fun than the stuff that’s bad. So yeah, it’s just sort of an exploration of that. |
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| Bastille – Warmth Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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In an interview, Dan Smith said "on my 30th birthday, France’s Bastille Day, a truck ploughed into a crowd of revellers in Nice. A few weeks ago the regularity with which these awful incidents were happening was quite surreal. It almost felt like, OK, this is just the norm now. And that’s horrendous.” Trying to navigate in the current climate of our world is a focus point of the album, and this song is the source of the title "Wild World" The first part talks about how the news and media are always reporting and showing awful things that keep happening, and how it can be difficult to focus on anything but the negative, and so we look for distraction and comfort. This is summed up in the lines "I can't stop thinking about it I can't stop thinking about it Tell me did you see the news tonight?" I think that the song is about seeking comfort in someone you love, trying to forget for a moment the atrocities that we hear about everyday now. "Cause in your warmth I forget how cold it can be" If we focus on the feelings of happiness and safety with those that we love, it can often make it easy to forget everything else that is happening. We can forget or ignore the fact that we are lucky and that other people are going through hell. W can find comfort in the fact that we are comfortable. Conversely, "And in your heat I feel how cold it can get" may refer the way that having people who are precious to you can make you scared, because you know how easily it can slip away, and the thought of losing them is terrifying. We hear all the time about people who had something terrible happen and they lost people they care about. Both of these things make you want to hold on for dear life to what you hold dear-"Now draw me close Hold me in this wild, wild, world" I believe that the lines "I just keep talking about it But I'll do nothing about it" are talking about the culture of "slacktivism", where people will talk about how bad things are, they'll post about it on social media, argue about it, say how awful it is, but then they won't do anything in an attempt to change the way things are, to stop it happening again. Perhaps because they feel like they won't be able to make a difference because they are only one person. (Not part of the song, but the issue is that too many people think "I'm only one person, I can't change anything." But if everyone took action, then things would change. Just felt a need to add that). |
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| Bastille – The Currents Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I think it's pretty obvious that this song is about the things that politicians and people in the media have been saying in recent times, both in the UK (people like Nigel Farage) and in the US (Trump). Particularly this portion of the song: "How can you think you're serious? Do you even know what year it is? I can't believe the scary points you make Still living in the currents you create Still sinking in the pool of your mistakes Won't you stop firing up the crazies? Oh my God, my God I can't quite believe my ears" In the lead up to Brexit and the US election, controversial, racist and sexist things that politicians have been saying and doing have caused an atmosphere of tension. For example, in the UK, overt racism and xenophobia has become commonplace since certain political parties promoted the "Leave" campaign as a way to reduce immigration. Race hate incidents that have occurred leading up to the EU referendum, what has been described as an “explosion of blatant hate”, has included: * Gangs prowling the streets demanding passers-by prove they can speak English * Swastikas in Armagh, Sheffield, Plymouth, Leicester, London and Glasgow. * Assaults, arson attacks and dog excrement being thrown at doors or shoved through letter boxes of immigrants and racial minorities. * Toddlers being racially abused alongside their mothers, with children involved as either victims or perpetrators in 14 per cent of incidents. * A man in Glasgow ripping off a girl’s headscarf and telling her “Trash like you better start obeying the white man." * Comparisons with 1930s Nazi Germany and a crowd striding through a London street chanting: “First we’ll get the Poles out, then the gays!” Many people attribute this change in social climate to the public attitudes of some politicians and people in the media. Perhaps they say "I can't believe my ears, I don't want to believe my ears" because the reports of incidents such as these and the things that influential people have said that encourage and incite them are reminiscent of the initial stages of the Nazi party's persecution of the Jews, gays, Romani, blacks etc. Similarly with the US election coming up, both sexism and racism have been rearing their ugly heads. Black people assaulted at Trump rallies, people saying it's ok to treat women the way Trump does, Trump saying he wants to build a wall between the US and mexico, Trump saying he wants to ban muslims from entering the country. I think that this is what Bastille mean when they say "Still living in the currents you create Still sinking in the pool of your mistakes Won't you stop firing up the crazies?" The quote "When anybody preaches disunity, tries to pit one of us against the other. You know that person seeks to rob us of our freedom and destroy our very lives" is from a 1948 cartoon called "Make Mine Freedom!" which was Cold War Propaganda. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehDvnlyJPTA). I feel that Bastille is mocking the cartoon/what the american government was, and is still, promoting. The cartoon advocates for independent thought and questioning things that are too good to be true, while it is itself a piece of propaganda that is highly biased and deceptive in it's promotion of capitalism and the american dream. It obviously, as Cold War propaganda, implies that the only alternative to Capitalism is Russia-Style Communism and big government. It therefore manages, as do our politicians, the tell us not to trust people who are telling us what we want to hear and promising us the world, while simultaneously asking us to trust them as they tell us what we want to hear and promise us the world. |
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