Sugared

Jeans, I love you, you keep me warm Love, you give me content and form Oh, you feed me and keep me strong

The singer is mentioning at first a material object, here being the jeans, that keep him warm which induces in him a feeling of love for them. However, he personifies the jeans as if they were people and uses that pretext that he loves his jeans as a kind of bridge to talk about love in general. He claims that love gives him content and form and adds a certain vital dimension by stating that it'd be feeding and keeping him strong. However, we realize that the singer is not talking about love induced by some material object as the love he explained and pictured seems to be too strong just to be bound on an object like jeans. So, the jeans might be a metaphor for his beloved one. This verse seem to represent the first stage of love : we realize that we're falling in love for somebody and we do like that, but we try to avoid announcing it directly (cf. the metaphor with the jeans).

So I'll be alright And I don't mind being sugared, 'cause

Love being a positive emotion associated with joy and happiness gives the singer the feeling being sugared, which he likes a lot indeed since this is made clear with the understatements "I'll be alright" and "I don't mind being sugared". He might be trying to hide his real joy by alleging that he's somehow neutral about it, although inside he is not. Here, we recognize the second stage of a young love : we try to assert that this new love hasn't got that of a big effect on us, although that doesn't quiet correspond to our real feelings inside.

Oh, without my love, I'd be incomplete And without my love, I'd be all empty So, without my love, I would not be me

In the chorus, the singer cannot hide his real feelings after all after having tried to understate them. He is speaking now from the heart that the love he feels is emotionally crucial for him. It seems almost as if he tried to confess his love. The third stage is pictured here : we become conscious of the truth and unable to hide any longer what we feel.

Friends, I love you, you understand Thanks, you keep me as a good man Fans, you're lovely, you like our band. It's good.

Here, the singer might be telling his friends about his love. As he states they understand him and might even help him to manage his feelings and the situation as he adds that he loves them and he's thanking them for keeping him as a good man. The last line may have a double meaning. If we take it literally, the persona of the singer in the song is also a singer being in a band and their fans are amazed by the amical relations they have in the band, shown by the fact that his band friends helped him to handle his feelings. The second point of view is that his friends he mentioned before are the fans of the love experienced by the singer and of the hypothetical relationship between the singer and his beloved that might come to existence. That hypothetical relationship is called by the singer "band" in order to stay in the logic of the metaphor.

We're alright And we don't mind being sugared, 'cause

The singer is no longer talking just about himself, but about "we". His love seems to have found reciprocity and both are alright and get sugared. This is the climax of the previous parallel understatement, because now both of the relationship in its way to creation are understating their strong emotions they really feel deep inside.

Oh, without our love, we'd be incomplete And without our love, we'd be all empty So, without my love, I would not be me

Although we see here a parallelism, we can also note a gradation as the singer passes from "my love" and "I" to "our love" and "we". The love and all sensations coming with it are shared and divvied up. The song doesn't end in a good end though. The last strophe, there is a come back of the first person singular indicated by "my love" and "I would not be me". "My love" in this last strophe doesn't imply the romantic and affectionate feeling, but rather his beloved one. He permanently knows that without them, he would not feel like himself, he'd feel a missing piece. The tense of the verb "would be" gives us also to interpretational paths to go. If it is a conditional, he projects himself into that hypothetical situation of a breakup which would destroy him in his innermost heart. However, one might argue that the tense is a habitual past tense. In that case, the singer might be confessing that the love story didn't hold for long, but the emotions were so strong that he would not be the same person for a long time after the breakup. Maybe, he has never become the same person, he once was, again and he is just reassuring his friends mentioned in the second verse that he's over his ex.