Starlight

I am so sick of hearing people saying that 'they enjoy a song', we are here for the meanings of songs, not to hear rambuncious wallys going on about their favourite bit of a song

This song is a perfect example of what i went through at my darkest time. For me, this song is about someone going through a depression but also trying to get out of it. "Far away This ship is taking me far away Far away from the memories Of the people who care if I live or die" [The depression is the ship taking them away from the people who care about them, and are trying to help them. It's like they are becoming distant.]

"Starlight I will be chasing a starlight Until the end of my life I dont know if it�s worth it anymore" [I believe the startlight is the light at the end of the tunnel. The end of the pain & sorrow. The person is trying to get there but they are starting to give up, and think life isn't worth it anymore]

"Hold you in my arms I just wanted to Hold you in my arms" [personally this part is jus meaningful to me bcuz the depression began after my boyfriend of 4 years broke up with me. It wasn't the only reason I was in the slump but it sure as hell made me feel like maybe just being with him again would help me get better]

"My life You electrify my life Let's conspire to ignite All the souls that would die just to feel alive"

[that same person makes their life feel burnt. & conspiring to ignite could mean to resort to suicide, just as the part of souls wanting to die just to feel alive prob means that life doesn't feel right]

"ill never let you go If you promise not to fade away Never fade away...

Our hopes and expectations Black holes and revelations Our hopes and expectations Black holes and revelations"

[for me this part is about the people who are willing to help. so if they stay & promise not to leave then the depressed person will not let go as in die... the next stanza is the part where they get better & get hope again]

weird interpretation i know, but this song means all this to me & only me :p

I just wanted to share a recent experience with this song, and what it means to me. My fiancee died Easter 2011, and the past year was really horrible for me. Lately, though I've been doing a bit better, I've been afraid to move on with my life, because I don't want to leave behind our connection and everything we had together.

Last weekend, a friend of ours had a dream in which she was having a party. All our friends were there, except me, because I was depressed and didn't feel like being around people. At one point, she noticed someone in her computer room, and when she went in, it was my boyfriend. He sat her down in front of the computer, and asked her to tell me something for him. He started playing a video of this song, with the lyrics. At one point, he pointed to the screen and said "This is very important". As he touched the screen, the words began to glow. The line was "I'll never let you go, if you promise not to fade away. Never fade away."

This experience has helped me so incredibly much, and the song has so many levels of meaning for me. I know he was telling me how much he always loved me, and still does, and that he'll always be with me, that in moving forward I won't lose him. I also feel like, in the part that says "Let's conspire to alight all the souls that would die just to feel alive" he was telling me that I make a difference in the world, just by being who I am, and that I still have a reason for being here, even though he's not. He doesn't want me to stop being myself, because of feeling sad without him. He always said he loved my passion for life and my charisma, I know he wouldn't want me to go through life all dulled down and depressed.

I'd heard this song before, but never paid much attention to the lyrics. To me, this is what the lyrics mean. It's talking about someone who's dying, but he wants his girlfriend to know that she was what was really important to him in this life, and that he'll always be there, loving her, and that she should go on shining her own unique light in the world, just like always, because maybe she could make a difference in someone else's life. "Black holes and revelations" describe to me what someone goes through when they lose the person they love, and all the "hopes and expectations" they had together are gone. But it's a message of hope, more than loss. It's the missing piece that helps me go forward now, and is a song that reminds me of him without making me feel sad, like all the others do.

My personal interpretation, which though very contrived in order to fit my personal experience (what I wanted to hear) I think works quite well. Such is the beauty of abstract lyrics. Maybe someone has had a similar experience.

This ship is taking me far away < Ship being a metaphor for being in love Far away from the memories Of the people who care if I live or die < So absorbed in it that you only think about your love, a love in which the speaker is uncertain if the beloved still feels anything themselves (they are "star-crossed"), mentally abandoning all of the people who you know love you (family, friends)

I will be chasing a starlight Until the end of my life < starlight = true love, hope, happiness, etc. < This is especially meaningful to me because I actually have a tattoo of the image in this version of "The Star": ciromarchetti.com/ciromarchetti/Tarot_of_Dreams.html to represent exactly those things.

Let's conspire to ignite All the souls that would die just to feel alive < The souls in question being all of the "romantics", hopefully including these two. Ignite = spark true love.

Now I'll never let you go If you promised not to fade away < The promise in question not being an actual delivered promise; simply poetic license of "I'll never let you go if you never fade away" = "Regardless of what happens as long as your memory is still with me I will never let go of these feelings"

I just wanted to hold you in my arms < Possibly still more a metaphor for making and truly feeling the connection of mutual, everlasting love. Possibly literal, and therefore an exercise in understatement.

Our hopes and expectations, black holes and revelations < Both too perfectly abstract and multi-layered to try to reduce into any truly literal thought, and I think somehow completely self-explanatory in this context (Another beauty of the well-composed abstract)

So that's what it is to me anyway.

i think it might be drug related... the ship is taking him far away from the people who care if he lives or dies....the ship is his drug. i duno thats my thought

in an interview with MTV (available on MTV online), bassist Chris Wolstenholme said "It's kind of a love song about missing someone, friends, family, someone you love. It's really kind of upbeat."

ummmmm.....isn't it souls, not cells? Souls makes a little more sense

"Far away from the memories Of the people who care if I live or die" This is the saddest part. I think that this person is giving away everything he has, just to chase something he knows he's not going to get anyway. But he can't do anything about it, because the thing he chases is somewhat like a drug to him. He needs it and he has fallen for it completely. Tragic, really. I'm not even sure if he's following somebody he deeply loves, or is it more like his muse or a metaphor for his higher ideals.

"Our hopes and expectations Black holes and revelations" our hopes versus black holes - Our hopes are always very light and happy, whereas black holes symbolize this uncertainty and sinister ambience. So it feels like black holes somehow suck everything positive out of our hopes. expectations versus revelations - Usually, even when we imagine the worst case scenarios, we base our expectations on our former experiences, but since revelations can be very sudden and dramatic and can even turn our worlds upside down , they make our expectations useless. It seems like the first line refers to how people see the world and the second line to what the world really is like. It's like we create all these sweet illusions for ourselves, yet reality will always tear them down in the end.

OK, first of all, this just again proves what a lyrical genius Matt is.

first interpretation Since their first album, Muse have been writing about the trials and tribulation of fame and success. The "ship" in this song could be taken as referring to fame, which is making him drift away from his roots - he's never at home - and the result is that the people he finds himself surrounded by (fans and fellow musicians), in contrast to the people he grew up with, don't really care if he "live[s] or die[s]".

On some level, Matt picked up guitar in the first place because it was an instrument that could impress people; so maybe his musical journey started out (at least partly) in the pursuit of fame and fortune - the "starlight". He now knows that he can't easily give up this lifestyle, he's too deeply rooted in it already; but he's starting to have doubts whether it really is worth giving up his former life.

Now, the next stanza becomes a little more metaphorical: he's personifying the starlight. He sounds like a desperate or defeated - or unrequited - lover when he says "I just wanted to hold you in my arms", perhaps indicating that he just wanted to taste a little of the fame but he never really wanted to commit himself to it on this scale.

This lover, this starlight, "electrif[ies]" his life in the sense that it gives him a rush, it gives him meaning. He wants to share this rush with others, he wants to rock out, because he feeds off of that as well. He wants to "ignite" these "souls", these fans, who themselves would "die" (give up their current, supposedly boring lives) in order to "feel alive" (doing exactly what he's doing - living in stardom).

Furthering this branch of the metaphor, Matt now strikes a deal with the starlight that he has attained: he will keep living the star lifestyle, on the condition that he has the security of knowing that his starlight won't "fade" into obscurity - giving up his friends and family for stardom holds no reward for him if he's an obscure hero.

Finally, Matt juxtaposes "hopes and expectations" with "black holes and revelations". It would seem fame and fortune didn't turn out to be all he wanted it to be - his hopes got destroyed, sucked into a black hole. But his expectations of stardom were also inaccurate - he had a series of "revelations". It remains, however, curiously unclear whether these revelations were good or bad, and I believe herein lies the crux of this interpretation of the song.

The starlight as metaphor for fame and stardom is a very apt one. A star is something that shines brightly, for thousands of years. However, ironically enough, there's a lot of stars in the sky... But still, we can make out each and every one clearly at some stage or another. Again, this ties in with Matt's deal with the starlight, that he'll hold on to it as long as it stands out among the other stars in the night sky.

Also, a starlight is something distant, something unattainable. It is in this sense that this song always makes me think of the green light opposite the lake in F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - and it is also this that guides me into another interpretation of the song, that of a failed romance.

This has been my first interpretation, and it's a long one, so I'll only post my second (and further) one(s) if you guys ask for them. ^_^

I think his lover or loved one has killed themself.

"ship is taking me far away from the memories of the people who care if I liove or die"....

He is deeply depressed about it, and the further he falls into depression, he is consumed by it and the further he withdraws from his loved ones, the less he remembers that there is more to life than his love for this lost person

"Starlight I will be chasing a starlight Until the end of my life"

He is so consumed by his loss, that all he does is chase the memory of who he has lost - the startlight = a highlight of his life that that person was.

"I dont know if it’s worth it anymore" He will quite possibly kill himself if he dosn't die otherwise... he does not see a point to living without his lost one.

"Hold you in my arms I just wanted to Hold you in my arms"

A last caress or other expression of his love. This simply is designed to re-enforce his feeling of loss. possibly a feeling of being cheated.

"My life You electrify my life"

Re-enforcing the slarlight metaphor.

"Let's conspire to ignite All the souls that would die just to feel alive"

He knows depression, and he knows his lost one did. This is the line I think that indicates she killed herslef, as he is talking to the memory her (the starlight), and almost pledging to try to break through to people who tihnk that to feel something through their depression, they have to indulge in self harm - cutting, suicide etc...

"I’ll never let you go If you promise not to fade away Never fade away..."

Still talking to the memory of her, promising not to forget the lesson... a bit of concious thought talking to the sub soncious / promising himself not to forget her....

"Our hopes and expectations Black holes and revelations Our hopes and expectations Black holes and revelations"

Their hopes together, or what they had dreamt about and told eachother about are now crushed because she is gone, and that he is so deep into his depression that he sees no way out (throw back to "till I die, I don;t know if it's worth it anymore")

Revelations - possibly a biblical ref signalling the end...

I really really think this is it.

HOWEVER, the great thing about great songs is that so many different ppl are able to apply thier own interpretation.

Usually, in the most part, that will have something to do with thier own life experience.

So in other words, although this song connects to me in regards to a battle with deep depression over loved ones, your milage may vary! :-)

He will keep chasing it, holding onto the memory untill he dies.