Broken Promise

I love this song too, one of my favourites on the album. It is about adultery (according to an interview). Perhaps the line is 'cuckold eyes' not 'cuckled eyes' because a cuckold is a man whose wife is unfaithful.

It's important to know that this song is meant to be a dialogue between two persons.

The first verse belongs to character 1 who has broken a very important promise (possibly adultery).

After that character 2 takes over and we experience how much pain they feel.

This promise must have been something very dear to them (like wedding vows).

And character 2 can't accept the apology of character 1, because words don't mean anything anymore. A promise was a promise. A promise was broken and words lose their meaning.

The lines 'We'll rise above this, we'll cry about this' are a very bad apology indeed.

They seem like someone justifies their actions by saying: At least we can grow stronger out of this complication.

And that's insane.

But it's also crazy that character 2 wants to retaliate.

Pretending to love someone (Hate masquerading as love) is the worst form of love there is. It's the negation of the negation.

And the threat: 'I'll wait my turn to terrorize you. Watch you burn.' is heavy.

Of course, the tables have turned, but very dramatically.

Character 2 loses it and in the chorus, we get a feeling of how character 2 wants character 1 to burn in hell. It's so aggressive.

I really love this song i think is about someone who promised something to change someone's life

i'm thinking it's about adultery too. this song is so good...

Yeah definetely about being unfaithful.

Ok, I watch too much placebo stuff, but interestingly on 4music presents, Brian was talking about this song and said this is two men talking to each other – so there you go.

I read a interview, in a dutch music magazine with Steve Hewitt about the duet broken promise with Michael Stipe (R.E.M.): 'The song he were singing on was finished for over a year. Michael stayed in the same hotel in Paris as us. We had finished the song a second ago. It was wrote as a duet, but I knew that when Brian it will sing with a woman it never will be work. Ik saw Michael - we know each other from the movie Velvet Goldmine - and I get the best idea ever: two gaypeople that sing about adultery, that would be so brilliant! I was even hearing it in my head.' By the way.. I like this song!

in elizabethan times a metaphor for everyone knowing about your wife being unfaithful except you was that you were wearing cuckold horns that everyone could see except you, so yer i thought it was about being unfaithful too.

I agree that this song is about adultery as well mainly because of the "Cuckold eyes" verse.

Michael Stipe is stating that he wasn't faithful in the relationship. He broke a promise to remain faithful (whether it be marriage vows, etc) However, he feels that they will be able to over come his unfaithfulness, they can live with the reality of the curiosity to stray away from relationships and now they will know him cheating was a mistake, but it's in the past and just a lesson learned. He also says that he realizes that Molko is incredibly upset about the broken promise and he can't say or do much to convince him of anything else. He can now only experience the same thing happening to him.

Molko claims that he is hurt and upset about Michael Stipe's unfaithfulness. He feels that Stipe could possibly could have no idea what Molko is feeling, that his apologies are empty and they're offering him no peace to the fact that Stipe wandered. He doesn't believe that Stipe couldn't have enjoyed cheating in the relationship, sort of saying "If you knew it was wrong, why did you do it?"

Molko rests in the fact that he will get Stipe back. He will wait for his turn to wrong him in their own relationship. He will gain peace in watching Stipe suffer as same as Molko has. Their relationship was based on a bunch of "broken promises", but Molko's threat/idea to harm Stipe in the exact same way is a promise Molko will keep.

My thoughts.

Ok i agree with the unfaithful theorm but does anyone but me agree that most of this album has a really depressing, broken kind of attitude to it? its lovely though. still. depressing.