I was surprised with the amount of activity on this song, that no one has come up with the same conclusion for the last half as I did. The first half is quite obvious, and I agree with what everyone has said about it. He's talking about the battle with cancer, the ups and the downs, the side effects of medication and eventually, about being saved by his sister's blood marrow and recovering.
But after that, I think he continues to talk about struggling, not about hope or inspiration. The line that makes this most obvious is "I fought a war to walk a gang plank into a life I left behind."
I've never had cancer, so I can't speak from personal experience, but its not at all hard to imagine that surviving cancer would be almost as difficult as fighting the cancer. He was on so much medication during the fight that his body will likely never be the same. He also likely had to completely put the rest of his life on hold so he could focus entirely on fighting the cancer. The people closest to him might have stuck around for that process, but others probably would have lost patience and disappeared from his life.
He's also repeatedly saying "doors got locked, there's no one here but me."
I think going through any event that makes you confront your own mortality and then trying to relate to other people who have not been through that would be incredibly difficult. Just hearing people complain about their mundane problems when you know that any day you could die would be impossible. I'm sure going through that would basically, again, put an end to many relationships, or "lock the door" on those relationships, leaving him alone, as the only person that really understands what he went through.
I can hear the struggle in the music as well. Right after he say's "the walls fell and there I lay saved" you hear the joyous piano line. It almost sounds like Ode to Joy, and I'm sure that when he first got the news that the cancer was gone, that's how he must have felt. But then the music changes. You start to hear sounds of the music rewinding as if he is now traveling back in time. He's trying to get back to life the way it was before the cancer and slowly realizing that he can never go back. He may have survived the cancer, but it still stole many years of his life that he can never get back.
I was surprised with the amount of activity on this song, that no one has come up with the same conclusion for the last half as I did. The first half is quite obvious, and I agree with what everyone has said about it. He's talking about the battle with cancer, the ups and the downs, the side effects of medication and eventually, about being saved by his sister's blood marrow and recovering.
But after that, I think he continues to talk about struggling, not about hope or inspiration. The line that makes this most obvious is "I fought a war to walk a gang plank into a life I left behind."
I've never had cancer, so I can't speak from personal experience, but its not at all hard to imagine that surviving cancer would be almost as difficult as fighting the cancer. He was on so much medication during the fight that his body will likely never be the same. He also likely had to completely put the rest of his life on hold so he could focus entirely on fighting the cancer. The people closest to him might have stuck around for that process, but others probably would have lost patience and disappeared from his life.
He's also repeatedly saying "doors got locked, there's no one here but me." I think going through any event that makes you confront your own mortality and then trying to relate to other people who have not been through that would be incredibly difficult. Just hearing people complain about their mundane problems when you know that any day you could die would be impossible. I'm sure going through that would basically, again, put an end to many relationships, or "lock the door" on those relationships, leaving him alone, as the only person that really understands what he went through.
I can hear the struggle in the music as well. Right after he say's "the walls fell and there I lay saved" you hear the joyous piano line. It almost sounds like Ode to Joy, and I'm sure that when he first got the news that the cancer was gone, that's how he must have felt. But then the music changes. You start to hear sounds of the music rewinding as if he is now traveling back in time. He's trying to get back to life the way it was before the cancer and slowly realizing that he can never go back. He may have survived the cancer, but it still stole many years of his life that he can never get back.