Lean On

About young love looking into the future and hoping that person is still by their side to lean on.

So on a purely practical level the first line of the chorus refers to two seperate things: 'Blow a kiss'- an act of romance, and 'fire a gun'- an act of violence. Sex and death- and those two things are without doubt intrinsically linked. Throughout history, one of the main guarantees of the survival of many species has been the little electric signals firing in the brain whenever death is around- there's fight or flight, sure, but there's also the command to make more babies- death is around, procreate, do it quickly.

Where the song steps into its own is with the next line 'we need someone to lean on.' This follows the line about sex and death, remember, and it suggests that on their own, blowing a kiss and firing a gun are not enough- to quote Star Trek, 'Survival is insufficient.' Something else is needed too: companionship. Culture. Civilization. Bear in mind that the music video takes place in India- one of the birthplaces of civilization and culture. It sounds a lot to me like the chorus is referring to the evolution of man.

If I were to push this theory further, I could say that the whole song slots into this definition pretty neatly:

'Do you recall, not long ago' - Human life originated about 200,000 years ago- in cosmological terms, that's yesterday.

'We would walk on the sidewalk' - Humans probably originated in Ethiopia/Kenya- on the side of Africa. We were one of the first species to walk on two legs.

'Innocent, remember? All we did was care for each other.' - The first humans had no nationality and no religion, and thus very few reasons to go to war with each other.

'But the night was warm' - Remember that we are in Africa.

'We were bold and young.' - As before, humans have only just become a thing.

'All around the wind blows, we would only hold on to let go.' - This is a fancy metaphor, the blowing wind referring to the psychological need for exploration pushing and blowing humans to conduct their migration out of Africa, when they 'let go' of their homeland.

The chorus I've already discussed above.

The first verse discussed our history as a species, and the second looks at our future, which is why the first 3 lines are all questions (future = unknown)

'What will we do when we get old? Will we walk down the same road? Will you be there by my side?' - Nobody knows what's going to happen in the future of the species. The hope is that we don't end everything in World War 3 and blow ourselves off the face of the planet. The hope is that we can learn togetherness as a species and walk side by side down the same road (i.e. towards the same goal)- ending world hunger, space exploration, whatever.

'Standing strong as the waves fall over.' - to quote the NRDC website in a page about global warming:

Current rates of sea-level rise are expected to increase as a result both of thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of most mountain glaciers and partial melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice caps.

End of the world could easily be a tsunami.

'When the nights are long, longing for you to come home' - nights being a metaphor for any long, drawn out bad experience- we get through them because we know we have family to get back to, loved ones, and such like- something to live for.

'All around the wind blows, we would only hold on to let go.' - the urge to explore is still with us, and will never leave.

http://alltherelics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-secret-meaning-of-song-lean-on.html

The message of the song is clear in all its verses but gets a little complicated with its chorus. It’s clearly about a failed love relationship. We discover it has failed in the last verse where the singer speaks of “Longing for you to come home.” The reasons for the breakup are the tribulations of the modern world that buffet modern romance, couched in shoreline metaphors (wind and waves): “All around the wind blows” and then the reference to the singer and the loved one’s need for “Standing strong as the waves roll over.” The romance begins in youth “not long ago”: “We would walk on the sidewalk/Innocent, remember?”/“But the night was warm/We were bold and young.” The singer also admits that the relationship, while caring, was fragile: “We would only hold on to let go.” That could mean the end of the relationship was sadly inevitable: our love would last (we’d hold on) only to finally end (we’d let go). But it might also mean that the lovers were only holding on in order to have fun (letting go). The really interesting part of the song is the repeated chorus: “Blow a kiss, fire a gun/All we need is somebody to lean on.” I especially like Collin McLaughlin’s version of the song (picked up for the Volvo commercial), because McLaughlin sets the first line of the chorus (“Blow a kiss, fire a gun”) in a background vocal before the singer boldly states, “All we need is somebody to lean on.” You can almost here a silent “BUT” between that first line and the line following. I think that the song is telling us we don’t need superficial shows of caring (blowing a kiss) and we don’t need acts of violence (firing a gun)—in defense of each other, I assume is meant; “All we need is somebody to lean on,” somebody there to care, a long-lasting caring that has permanence, strength, and stability. The singer does end on a note of hope in the questions “What will we do when we get old?/Will we walk down the same road?/Will you be there by my side?” But the nights are still long and the winds still blow. We still need "somebody to lean on."