Communicator

I think this song is Gavin wishing he wasn\'t bi/didn\'t have to hide because he\'s famous.. but really when people don\'t feel safe coming out it\'s almost always because of negative conditioning during childhood. In their mind, coming out = annihalation.\n\n/\n/\n\n\nfirst verse is the struggle of carrying internalized homophobia/biphobia, gaslighting yourself about your own sexuality, wishing you could just be straight... \n\n/\n/\n\nHe\'s confused how strong his attractions for women are. Lots of bi/gay guys go through this, usually because they were conditioned to pursue women by external forces rather than purely external desires. Thus, there\'s a risk that I\'m exaggerating my attraction to them in order to minimize my homoeroticism. \n\n/\n/\n\n"And it never seems enough" basically implies that he might prefer men sexually/romantically. \n\n/\n/\n\n"Splinter left focus right" is his attempt to suppress/shatter/ruin his homoeroticism in favor of heterosexuality.. Gay/bi people are more likely to be left-handed, and similarly there\'s been a long tradition of prejudice against left-handers. \n\n\n\nI think the whole "mortal" part is him being a guy, and feeling existential terror because growing up being gay was associated with being hate-crimed or otherwise bad outcome. By convincing himself he\'s straight he has a false sense of security, as there are people who wish violence on non-heterosexuals..

A.....uh.....odd song, its gavins faverote on the album though, this and cold contagious. Very abstract and i like that. Just a guess but he was probably REALLY STONED when he wrote it, gavin was a open pothead during this album and 16 stone. Anyway hes just probably writing his train of thought about a girl he met and was stoned no doubt. yes. Odd song, abstract.

haha i was thinking the same thing. But i kinda thought maybe it was about gwen b/c they met on tour. just a guess though.

truely an eerie song. one of the best on the second half of the album. but i do admit, the second half of razorblade suitcase kinda dropped the adrenaline rush. they should have put that song Old in there near the end...

I've always thought of this song, as if I were the words of someone suffering from depression. He's looking something out there that will make things fine again...a woman. When your depressed you don't feel scared of death, to you it seems as the only way out. The part "this mortal soil around me, mortal feeling I have found, surrounded by your glory, hold me now so that I never drown." to me means that now he has found someone that is worth living for, he feels mortal now, and he wants her to hold on to him so that he'll never feel that way again, because next time he will die. This song hold alot of personal feelings in it and I just think it's an amazing song.

It's amazing to see that other responses to this song have filtered in through the years. I will probably never meet anyone in real life who even knows that this song exists.

And what a fascinating song it is. I used to think of it as one of the most forgettable in the early years. If it were possible for slumps to have pinnacles, this song very much felt like the pinnacle of the late-album "slump".

But sometimes when your thoughts about a song get that extreme, you are forced to take a second look, just to be sure. Well, it's definitely the same spacey "lost" sort of melody I remember from before, and I still think the random "bursts" of guitar that come out sound oddly close to someone snoring. Even the frequency of the guitar "bursts" is akin to that of someone breathing irregularly in their sleep. There is a period of silence, then they snort some more. (I notice a lot of use of silence over this whole album though.) Then, of course, there's the final "burst" which essentially is the sleeper snoring loud enough to wake him/herself up.

I agree with one of the above (below?) posters that this song very much sounds the way depression would sound if it could make a sound. Depression with a shot of ambivalence. "Wonder if I met my wife" is such a strange lyric to me. It's like one of those random things you think while in the throes of daydreaming at work or something.

I have another sort of strange bit of imagery that somehow filled in a gap in my imagination for this song. It has to do with the "Splinter left, focus right" segment. I keep wondering why it is that he feels the need to repeat the words "Focus right" so many times, until it occurred to me that he only repeats the words "Focus right" when there is guitar feedback following the last time he said it. Which led me to think that the guitar feedback was in some way signifying that whoever (or whatever) Gavin was trying to tell to focus right wasn't doing it. Which then got me to thinking about him in space, stuck inside of some kind of spaceship that wouldn't always obey his command. So sometimes he would try to look around (looking for his wife?) in space by commanding his ship to turn or look left (why the use of the word "splinter", I don't really know), then he would tell it to look to the right, but sometimes the spaceship would stall. And the sound of the guitar feedback is the spaceship stalling, so he tries again, a little more assertively, "Focus right!" but he has to do it literally four times on the last chorus (if that even IS the chorus) to get it to work.

No wonder he can't find his wife, he's lost in space riding around in a spaceship that doesn't work. The fact that I used to play this album alongside Starfox 64 on my Nintendo 64 is probably why I tend to associate so much of this album with space in the first place though.

I think this song is Gavin wishing he wasn\'t bi/didn\'t have to hide because he\'s famous.. but really when people don\'t feel safe coming out it\'s almost always because of negative conditioning during childhood. In their mind, coming out = annihalation.\n\n\n\nfirst verse is the struggle of carrying internalized homophobia/biphobia, gaslighting yourself about your own sexuality, wishing you could just be straight... \n\n\nHe\'s confused how strong his attractions for women are. Lots of bi/gay guys go through this, usually because they were conditioned to pursue women by external forces rather than purely external desires. Thus, there\'s a risk that I\'m exaggerating my attraction to them in order to minimize my homoeroticism. \n\n\n"And it never seems enough" basically implies that he might prefer men sexually/romantically. \n\n\n"Splinter left focus right" is his attempt to suppress/shatter/ruin his homoeroticism in favor of heterosexuality.. Gay/bi people are more likely to be left-handed, and similarly there\'s been a long tradition of prejudice against left-handers. \n\n\n\nI think the whole "mortal" part is him being a guy, and feeling existential terror because growing up being gay was associated with being hate-crimed or otherwise bad outcome. By convincing himself he\'s straight he has a false sense of security, as there are people who wish violence on non-heterosexuals..