The Jitters

i really dig the atom heart mother sound effects

Travis's delivery in this song is awe-inspiring. He sings the whole thing like a disinterested cry for help. When he drags himself to the end of the line "nothing's wrong, I'm just fine/ I've realized I just don't like jokes" you know exactly how this character is feeling. The 5/4 time signature, ride-heavy drums, and perpetually coasting guitar and bass parts add so much to this song. Awesome.

The narrator of our song dislikes his friends and close acquaintances. He can see right through the lies they tell, the acts they put on every day, the agendas they try to keep secret. They’re phonies. He breaks away and isolates himself in his apartment and his job, reducing his social contacts to practically nil.

He’s bored now. He has so much free time on his hands he can do 10,000 pushups in a day just to pass the hours. Life slows down. The boredom makes him so restless he can barely sleep at night. He’s tired all the time and has little motivation. Work is tedious, almost unbearable.

Bitter and depressed, he can’t stand the amusement and frivolity of others. He’s so disgusted with people he’d like to move away, find another place where life might be better (but where?). Even if he wants to be with his friends at this point, he’s been away from them for too long to be close to them again (as also happens in the song A Life Of Possibilities). When he tries talking to them they don’t seem to listen. He can tell just by the way they move, lean back in their chairs, shake their heads that they just don’t care about anything he says. No one tells it to him outright but he’s ostracized.

Now he’s in a total rut. He’s alone and bored, completely isolated. He wants his friends back but makes no attempt to reconnect with them because he also hates his friends, hates how they don’t listen, how they care only for themselves. He sees them in passing ‘like highway signs’ which come and disappear and at this point he can’t even tell if they’re keeping their distance because he wants them to or because they want to stay away from him now.

It’s a song about, paradoxically, feeling the same restlessness and isolation when you’re with people as when you’re without them and on your own. Morrison has dubbed this feeling ‘the jitters’ and I’m sure a great many of us have sometimes had jitters of our own. :)

That’s my interpretation anyway!

this song reminds me of high school and how badly i want to leave it behind me.

this song is so close to my life, it's eerie. well, my friend's life i mean. just seeing as he "cut all ties" with me, i see this song close to my life too.

Man I got the jitters. How depressing this song is.

The moment I started listening to the lyrics, I immediately understood what they were saying. Everyone sentence and analogy, the delivery, the sound, everything comes down to an expression of deep depression. As someone who deals with this from day to day, this song is one of my favorites. The line "Nothing's wrong, I'm just fine, I realized I just don't like jokes" is everything you feel about the we feel in depression: absence of meaning, emptiness of motion.

It's about going on a depression-anxiety driven spree, eliminating positive things in your life, then suffering the consequences.