King of Wishful Thinking

This song's a masterpiece in the art of inducing grief in the listener via cognitive dissonance. The singer announces his intent to deceive himself about how much his breakup is hurting him, and the accompanying musicians play an upbeat tune in collaboration with this plan, but the clever symbolism in the words reveals the carnival atmosphere of the music to be an empty show and leaves us with a bleak appreciation for how very deeply in despair the singer really is. Realizing the madness of his attempts to pretend otherwise thus inspires us to pity him in his miserable condition.

The music video captures this effect very well in showing the singer against a blank white background (a common way of depicting madness in comic books), and then throwing together a purely random collage of many different people engaged in various unrelated--and therefore seemingly pointless--activities behind him. This is something like getting a view directly into his mind, and its desperate attempts to distract him from his loneliness and heartbreak by thinking of anything else at all. Even then, the words break through all the visuals to remind us that it's hopeless. The refrain that he's "The King of Wishful Thinking" is the singer's way of admitting everything else he says is a lie and he's NOT going to "get over" this breakup any time soon.