Atlantis

Atlantis is a metaphor for the peak of the sixties, when it seemed a new world was being created, a good world. Some people describe that time in history as having brief flashes of utopia, which ultimately ended up disappearing, but it's influence still lies heavily on the world today: an Atlantis if you will.

I think the feeling in this song is also characterized by the Stephen King book Hearts in Atlantis, and a passage in a book by Hunter S. Thompson. It goes:

...the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - -that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.