5 Meanings
Add Yours
Share
Video Lyrics
Barren stares as they light up the screen
Bearing teardrops that shatter in slow-motion
Novacaine our brains and we're out like lights
And as I'm growing older I'm bored
And I remember when misery thrilled me much more
When I can't relax, I'd like to go back
But that's gone
Yeah, that's gone
Turn around
Turn the volume down
We're counting the days down
Till the day when we live in a video
I'll be stone-faced and pale
You'll pout in stereo
24 hours every day of the year
Oh, what fun I can't wait
'Til the future gets here
Closing in on the pain and the torture
He's slamming the door like it's something to strive for
The girl tearing curtains down looked funny as hell
And a sense of humor can there be any doubt
Yeah, well natural selection has weeded it out
Used to keep me from laughing out loud
But that's gone
We don't think that way no more
That's gone, turn around,
Turn the volume down
We're counting the days down
Well I've seen some old friends sort of die
Or just turn into whatever must've been inside them
And whatever all of us had then in common grew up
And left home
We don't think that way no more
Turn around, turn the volume down
We're counting the days down
I think it's about growing old and how much it stinks. This song is really beautiful too, I wish it weren't so depressing.
It seems like it's about how Ben hates watching old home movies because everything that seemed so important back then seems trivial in the present, and it sort of desensitiezes you.
word from ben folds, in a recent interview i had with him "Video is really a song about how people always change, as you grow up you become different and looking back on it you are amazed at how different you are now"
I agree with all of the above, it's just about retrospet. To be honest it kind of makes me want to dread the futre. I didn't like this song too much until I heard some really old version of it off an demo album they put out in the way early 90s. It's less instrumental and Ben's southern accent is even more noticable, it almost sounds like a country song, for some reason it just works for this song.
This has got to be one of the saddest and most beautiful BFF songs. In addition to the "people change" theme that has been mentioned, I hear it as a song about the promise of fame. When you've been so demoralized and jaded by the world in general, the only thing the narrator has to hang onto is the dream of being famous, living in a music-video world where his affected boredom and alienation are put on display to the whole world as "coolness."