Living My Life

first song to really grab me off the new album. as with most deerhunter lyrics, it seems to offer impressions rather than something you can pin down for certain. so here's my totally subjective interpretation:

the lyrics seem to point to a period of transition ... to me, the draining of color in "amber waves of grain" turning to "grey", coupled with the distance and remoteness of being "out of range" implies slipping into a period of melancholy and alienation, an existential malaise, but maybe it's more of a general peaks & valleys of life thing than a total metamorphosis. the fact that he's out of range "again" indicates that he isn't always like this. something has caused his perspective to shift right for now, but it continues to go back and forth.

to me, the "fading frontier" could represent a boundary, a sort of limbo between these two perspective worlds -- a world of color and the world drained of it (depressive state). a frontier represents a border separating two countries, though the word does have other connotations. he's spent much of his life hanging out in this in-between space, sort of wasting his life ("how to recover the lost years?") and not making choices out of fear. the fact that the frontier is fading could mean he feels he must finally make a choice, that this space is no longer sustainable. or simply that the frontier itself is illusory, a distortion of his mind, so he needs to stop hanging out there so much, letting himself waste away in his own little idiosyncratic world. we all have places in our minds where we can get lost for periods of time, feeling "cut off" from the world. it's easy to indulge in that rather than trying to 'conquer fear' and find a way to feel alive. maybe this 'frontier' no longer has any meaning to offer him but he keeps going there out of sheer habit ("I’ve spent all of my time out here / Chasing the fading frontier"). he knows he's chasing illusions, but can't help himself. it's a familiar place to him.

i haven't read a lot of press about the new album, but i did hear that some of it was inspired by bradford getting hit by a car. a near-death experience can often cause a sudden shift in perspective. maybe it made him feel that he had wasted much of his life focusing on the wrong things, lost on the 'fading frontier.' could the it in "it's happening again" at the end be his life? as in, he's had all these ups and downs but he finally feels alive again, galvanized by a traumatic experience? or is the "it" that's happening again the period of grey described in the lyrics? could go either way, but the "new appreciation for life" people often have after a bad accident would fit with the more hopeful interpretation.

lots of scattered thoughts here, and obviously I'm projecting a lot of myself onto scant lyrics, but i'm really connecting with this one.

I think he's singing about living his life.