| Broken Bells – The High Road Lyrics | 9 months ago |
| I first heard this song 15 years ago after I had mistakenly hurt a guy I had been seeing, because I felt hurt by something he had done. The words in the refrain: “you let loss be your guide” went nuclear inside of me. Such a common human misstep: I was hurt, so let me hurt someone. Loss as a guide, to me, isn’t meaninglessness, it’s tragedy. It’s preventable. In a very subtle way this song is largely and latently about abundance: our blindness to seeing it, perceiving it, remembering it, operating from a place of it. Our limited vision: the flashlights on a quiet deserted and isolated road at night. “The dawn to end all nights…”, the dreamlike and smoke-filled imagery of these isolated incidents in the video suggesting we experience and perceive events in a vacuum, which is a universal human trait; things being broken, lost, taken away, but the hyper-focus on these losses at the expense of everything else we still have… coming from a place of reaction rather than faith, of Absence versus Object Permanence…all these incidents and decisions and judgments being made right before things are about to change: right before dawn when it’s the darkest part of night (“come on and get your overdose” aka give up, “collect it at the borderline” ie right before the shift is about to take place)… perhaps the most prevalent and persistent and common flaw in our thinking: that the limited bit we see in front of us is all there is, and all there will be. And the terror and subsequent pain of acting from that perspective. This song electrifies, haunts, and energizes me all at once, every time I hear it. By focusing on what isn’t, it refers entirely to What Is. And that is what we can’t (or won’t) see. | |
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