Prototype

god i love this song

id say its about a guy who is trying to move on from a past love and seems to be attracted to a girl just because she reminds him of the past love

the song talks about how she is maybe fabricated in his mind and that shes not "the real thing" and just he is making himself believe she is

absolutely great

this is probably my second favorite of their songs. gotta love it.

After you date somebody that you are really into, possibly love, you hold the following girls up to those standards, they have to have those "wild orchid lips" He "designed" (hand picked) this girl so that she was physically as close to perfect (his love) as he could get BUT

Its not good enough, shes a stoner and depressed, passionless.

He realizes that this girl is merely a prototype of his old girfriend, that he hasn't found better, he has gone back a step

and wants to be with his former love, or girl who is on par or above her

Amazing song. So after couples break up, people tend to date people who resemble their past partner if they're not over them well this guy obviously isn't over her emerald eyes, uploaded with your attitude. he refers to the new girl as a machine he found a girl that looks like his ex and is the same in a way but she won't do because she isn't the real thing and he wishes his ex will save him from the "machines" rather than be with who she is now so she's moved on, while he hasn't.

I personally always just saw this song as a guy going after a girl her reminds him of an old girlfriend he loved - only thing is, it's just not her, hence the "not the real thing" and blah blah blah, something like that... :)

actually. this song was origonaly writen in pennsylvaina, where the singer and a friend joined together to create it. The friend created the lyrics which were about his recently ex girlfriend and how everywhere he went he would see people who looked like her, but weren't the "real thing"...

This song can be interpreted from a love perspective, but I believe the meaning is more than that. I think this has more to do with the Information Age and the loss of humanity when we get enthralled in the Information Age.

The fact that the singer/author "made her from pieces of stars" and "he gave her lips from wild orchids when she came out of the cocoon" recognizes the creation of her through an unrealistic means, as if she was processed or generated, rather than born, similar to robots or computers being created by mankind. Hence she is the "prototype" or robot f this age, and this idea is further rendered from "I programmed her with eye color" and "she will do it like a machine." The fact that the singer tells this in the first person recognizes that he is indeed a human, yet he creates her aside from the way humans normally wouldn't.

And then there's the idea of dystopia thinking. "A sky that burned not to return" and "I can barely see the sun, now it's blue" recognizes that the world isn't the same as it should be. Instead, it has been rendered and changed from the past, become this sort of future dystopian computer world where we create robots to have human thought.

Essentially, the world is Earth, but no longer fruitful, so the author makes this "prototype" as a way to bring some sort of humanity into the world. The author/singer tries to program nature into this "prototype" with "majestic emerald green" and "her heart is a red balloon." Yet, all of this majestic emerald green and red balloons are just metaphors of the past, feel good images that are now only artificially rendered (they no longer exist in the new world, so the author/singer tries to bring them back so that the world is still Earth-like and not all robotic).

Lastly, I interpret this song as if the author's immediate youth was lost. The author/singer seems to realize the world has changed in the past, and he's bringing back his lover into a world that has vastly changed through information and industry. It's not so much that he ost his love to another man or woman, it's the fact that the world has changed and taken away everything Earth-like, and this "protoype" he creates is his way of re-experiencing the past world in an artificial way. He wants to go back to the past world of "wild orchids" rather than be consumed by machines, so he makes the best of what he has, even if it's artificial.