All Those Friendly People

This song, for me, is about trying to convey a seemingly conventional message to a girl dominated by the material lifestyle. he says "take me away from this city's soul decay." He wants to get away from man-made life, and he finally does and see's how good it is. He still loves this girl though.. and thats the problem. he wants her to stop being so generic and he wants her to feel the beauty of the "colors" of life rather than just seeing them on the television. the lyrics also say that she wasnt answering her phone. so in a hyperbolic sort of way, i feel that "the funeral suits" are reiterating and displaying the fact that it is so hard to dig some girls out of this way of thinking. after trying to call her to no avail, he goes to the extreme, he kidnaps her.. The whole time she thinks he is going to kill her but in reality he is forcefully showing her the beautiful part of life, that which is nature. The pigs in the video, in my opinion, symbolize the hungry and horny men in our generation trying to get a piece of her drooling all the way. the only way to escape these men is to become usurped by nature, so she runs into the ocean, free at last. The guy with the weird nose kills the pig subliminally saying he wants to get rid of the obnoxious and horny men that only care about the girls looks and nothing on a more deep and intellectual level.

To me, the song sounds like he's come to realize how she sees the world, full of cynicism and disinterest - doesn't really stop to smell the roses, that sort of thing. He's into her and she SAID she's into him too, but possibly right now the feelings changed. You can feel his frustration as the song progresses, how she's slipping away, or rather, he realizes that she isn't good for him, probably not into him anymore, how she's "burying" him and no one can help. So he's just wasting away.

To me this song's teaching a lesson about not taking people for face value. 'All those friendly people' is the song writer being sarcastic, and he's really implying that 'all those friendly people' are just bad people in disguise.

It tells a story about (going by the official music video) a woman who always stayed at home, never gaining the life experience you really need to survive out in the real world. (Hid away ’til I was eighteen, only saw colours on a TV screen)

She met a man who she believed would be her prince charming, saving her from her current life in a city which she felt was slowly killing her. (Take me take me far away, from this city’s soul decay)

Due to her lack of life experience she believed everything this man told her, never questioning his motives. (I am young and I an naïve, tell me something I will believe)

Little did she know that what she thought she knew about the man was all a façade, a mask. In truth he took her in so he could control and manipulate her. (Life for you is shades of grey - this is important. It is referencing 50 shades of grey which is a book all about a man who wants to dominate and control every aspect of her through their relationship after she foolishly falls for his vast wealth and outside charm)

She gets trapped in a relationship with him where she feels like she's drowning, probably because he won't let her leave. (Slide into the sea, landslide coming down on me)

He tries to change her to be what he wanted, envisioning an almost lifeless woman to do his bidding. (You said in the time the pain would pass)

This idea terrifies her, and she runs away, escaping from him into the world. That's where she is now, writing this song on some motorway.

This is the only interpretation I could come up with that fitted in with the music video for the song. The man involved is represented in a mask and acts like he's doing a stage performance. You can see how forceful he is with her throughout the video. The two men in pig masks represent the idea of what the both of them should be, an idea which he tries to force on her and which scares her off.

Some of our most powerful emotions stem from feelings of loss. This song immortalizes a stretch of time that shrinks to a fleeting moment. It grows dim as the years pass but it’s always with you. And then it crashes into the conscious, bringing you to your knees all over again.

I simply cannot believe these absurd explanations of this song that I am reading. The only one with a decent interpretation is i5m1thy. The rest? Seek help, especially if you've seen the video that goes along with the song.

To each their own, but to me this is clearly about the shit women deal with on a day to day basis at the mercy of men, as well as the man's inability to truly understand the fear women deal with. A lot of sad little men tend to romanticize random women as their ideal partner or piece of meat when they don't know a thing about them, much less think of them as a regular human beings just like themselves. One might refer to these sorts of men as pigs. Who sends these men off into this toxic mindset in the first place?