Fidelity

General CommentThe song lyrics are a double entendre (one word or phrase, two which can be taken different ways) which I find someone with Regina's calibre to love to use often. Sting is another, for instance (see Ring Around Your Finger and I'm so Happy).

Though a lost love means you are "heartbroken" , in this case she is expressing how it "breaks her heart" that she's never allowed herself to fall in love or rather how it's taken so long that she's now found a man she loves dearly.

"All these sounds... voices" she's been lost in. Voices of doubt and fear, which have protected her so far. The second verse expressed all the things she would have regretted had she never met this man and simply "kept on singing love song to break my fall"

As mentioned before, watch the video and in the end she gives her heart , symbolized by handing a heart shaped necklace, which "breaks" open to reveal the love and splendid "colours" of love (against her previous B&W world) which are discoverd from meeting her "true love" which then appears as her man (from the abtract headless body of a man she viewed before).

Her heart is not broken from a failed romance, but her protected heart is "broken" to open her love completely to this man.

Of course "all my friends say its gonna get better" is another double entendre. Where most are familar with one saying "its going to get better" after a failed romance, in this case it really means that the things she feels now in the beginning of this love is only going to get even better. Emphasized as she expressed in the song by repetition.. bettah bettah bettah better better!!!

Remember, its called FIDELITY , a term for clear and atuned understanding. She's discovered true love and is saying "Ah Haa!".

It's a love song, pure and simple.

• 2 Replies Log in to reply

General CommentI love the beat to this song. It's so simple but just makes you want to move.

I think the song is about her trying to protect herself from heartbreak by absorbing herself in music, but she falls in love and has her heart broken anyway.

• No Replies Log in to reply

General Commentyep, i think venus in mohair got it right. it's not as lyrically dense as some of regina's other cryptically versed songs, so it's pretty straightforward.

i think in the second verse, in addition to wanting to protect herself from heartbreak, she finds herself also regretting her decision to let him in and she contemplates if it had been better to live within the imagination of the songs rather than the real life experiences she had with the guy. ("suppose I never ever saw you, suppose I kept on singing love songs
just to break my own fall").

it could also be about missed opportunities - maybe she had to let him go to seriously pursue her music. and while the music soothes her, it also breaks her heart because she is reminded of what she left him for and contemplates her decision.

this song reminds me of the first time i heard a regina song a year or so ago and immediately thought, "i'm really gonna like her". now i can't wait to get the album! *long wait* i think regina has outdone herself with this one. i always think she has, but then she comes and surprises again.

• No Replies Log in to reply

General CommentI disagree with many of the comments - I think the narrator is still in love. In the first verse, she talks about how she always protected herself and then went crazy in her own thoughts. I think that "and it breaks my heart" refers to thinking about how closed off she used to be before she experienced true love. I think the second verse is so joyful and even intimate. What if she continued to block herself from the intimacy and happiness that she seems to be describing here?
I do think that there is an element of pain, but i think that the pain she's feeling is the intense emotion of falling in love after closing herself off to it for so long. Overwhelmed, I guess.
Amazing song! So beautiful.

• No Replies Log in to reply

General CommentI don't read so deep into it like you guys, but I think the song's just simply about opening your heart up fully to someone you love, running the risk of breaking it. That's what I got from the music video. Like when she protects her heart by not giving it to anyone fully, and her world is all black and white. But finally one day she decides to give it to someone and her world is full of colors.

• No Replies Log in to reply

General CommentCODYSAN; I think you gave the best insight so far... IT IS A JOYFUL SONG OF SOMEONE WHO IS OPENING HER HEART FOR LOVE, breaking it, and in a good way, for after feeding herself with illusion(songs and words) and always protecting herself, now she realizes how falling in love for real is the best thing ever...
I love the videoclip and this song.
Falling in love always hurts too, to some degree, there is this longing and anxiousness and missing the other one that can pretty much ache in the chest, even physically sometimes.
"Suppose ... just to break my own fall"

Suppose is connected to break.
She meant kind of "if all these things haven´t happened, I´d have not fallen in love.
T break here means to stop, and not to make it broken... she was living illusions just to avoid her own falling in love. But... you can see it in the whole video how it was, at first, her imagination in play, until HE became real and brought collors into her life.

She was always supposing how would it be, conceiving it in her head, waiting until it would become real - and using her imagination as some sort of frame that would tell her "hey, that guy you´ve been dreaming of is right here, in front of you, now you don´t need to wait anymore to just fall in love"

And because suppositions is what she´s been always doing, she also does that to check her reality now sort of, as she delights herself with the new feelings and the "crush" she has on this guy.

Though I think that the meaning of "break" is to "stop" in the verses mentioned above, I still think that what codysan said is exactly it, her before protected heart is now breaking up open wide to this love.

This woman is such a genius!

• No Replies Log in to reply

My InterpretationFor me, the tone of this song comes across as oblique, implied, understated and this captures my imagination. It's like a puzzle for me. Earlier this evening, I was watching an old episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and this song was sound-card to one of the key scenes of the show. I'd forgotten this tune, even though it's a bit of an earworm. Anyhow, youTube.. Songmeanings.. here goes..

Fidelity feels like an irony in how it's used as the title, as so often we are NOT faithful to our true nature, by-passing really showing up in life, NOT living in conscious awareness.

Getting lost in all the sounds and inner voices has an undertone, something like how, if rehearsed often enough, we begin to believe the folklore we script for ourselves. We drift so reflexively into unexamined held-beliefs, and by keeping our world small, its smallness might serve to make it all the more controllable, as in protecting her heart truly, rather than truly letting it beat to its own rhythm.

Hearing all these words and music in the mind - it doesn't sound like she's speaking about a felt sense of something lyrical or harmonious - rather, it feels to music what a life lived in the head, is to living.. it's imaginary life.

The conditional flavour of the song is amplified by her list of what-ifs which stand contrary to fact. She submits that suppose none of these things had happened.. but implicitly they seem to have taken place, in spite of her circumstances. At the same time, we don't really know if she's suffering from loss or heartache. She does seem to acknowledge the unpredictibility of loving; that the willingness to risk is more complex than any ability to engineer desired outcomes. We just can never know how things are going to turn out and sometimes it's easier not to find out due to fear. I garner this from the line, "Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my fall.."

The fact that her friends say that it's going to get better, again, it harkens to my impressions of the title, Fidelity, and its ironic usage; that we are often unfaithful to our true nature, abandonning our own wisdom, in favour of the voice of others.

The video for this song has a kind of literal quality, starts off all black and white, with an imaginary lover. Then through an apparent willingness to risk, he takes true form, and life suddenly gets very colourful as the couple are seen to opt to experience life freely, rather than simply think about it.

I enjoy the paint throwing scene in the vid. It reminds me of the Indian festival of Holi. Holi has a lighthearted quality to it, in the way that Valentines Day has in the West. Curiously it's further interesting and happenstantial that the Festival of Holi derives from the Legend of Prahlada and Holika. The moral-of-the-story to this legend is basically that he who torments the truly faithful, will be soundly defeated. Full circle.. Fidelity.

• No Replies Log in to reply

General CommentTo me, this song is saying that even if you love someone, when you are with them you give up the opportunity to be in other relationships that could also be awesome.
That's what I think she's getting at when she says "suppose I never ever met you, suppose we never fell in love."
what would have happened if we had never been together? Would I be with someone else?
I think these questions are the voices and the sounds she hears in her head.

• No Replies Log in to reply

General CommentI think this song means that she never wanted to love anybody because she was too afraid to (I never loved nobody truly, always one foot on the ground) and what she did was loose herself in her music (and by protecting my heart truly I got lost in the sounds I hear in my mind ect.) and she feels she made a mistake cause once she found love and got a hold to see what if felt like she realized what she was missing (and by protecting my heart truly I got lost in the sounds I hear in my mind all these voices I hear in my mind all these words, I hear in my mind all of this music and it breaks my heart, it breaks my heart) also in the music video it shows her in the end happy with a guy so I think it means that she finally learned to let go

• 1 Reply Log in to reply

General CommentI like your interpretation, hautehautehaute. The lines about "and it breaks my heart," "all my friends say..." make me think that she'd suffered some kind of pain. It seems to me that something bad happened, but that she's still grateful for having experienced love. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to the listener, I suppose, but I never felt that this song was negative. I like the idea of the "pain" being less of a pain, more of an overwhelming rush of emotion.

I think everyone here has some pretty interesting comments to make. Fantastic song.

• No Replies Log in to reply