The Hawaiian island of Kauai was formed by a large number of lava flow rock layers which built upon one another over time. Today the highest point of Kauai reaches over 5000 feet. The island is beautiful and impressive, but it can also give a person vertigo. Many viewpoints have steep drop-offs, and it is also common to tour the island via helicopter.
As the island metaphor suggests, the concept of "vertical" represents both the up/down spacial dimension as well as the process of incremental growth over time. The experience of being vertical can be inspiring, dizzying, frightening, and/or illuminating. It is common both to reach for record heights and also to worry about falling abruptly into setbacks. At the same time, one can also question whether reaching high heights is even important at all.
The meaning of the parking lot lines is less clear, but the repetition of these lines suggests they are important. Perhaps crossing the parking lot represents a childhood goal that is literally horizontal and rather meaningless by adult standards. Regardless of the true importance of this goal, at some point it is replaced by the desire to climb higher and higher when “everything went vertical.”
Another clue about the parking lot is that while the lyrics include many beautiful images about nature, parking lots are considered to be unnatural and ugly. The child could initially be complaining about the ugliness of this parking lot and humanity’s impact on the environment that contributes to the lot's hot surface. When everything goes vertical, however, the child realizes that the parking lot is simply a result of society’s natural vertical growth, which is not unlike trees growing taller in nature.
The Hawaiian island of Kauai was formed by a large number of lava flow rock layers which built upon one another over time. Today the highest point of Kauai reaches over 5000 feet. The island is beautiful and impressive, but it can also give a person vertigo. Many viewpoints have steep drop-offs, and it is also common to tour the island via helicopter.
As the island metaphor suggests, the concept of "vertical" represents both the up/down spacial dimension as well as the process of incremental growth over time. The experience of being vertical can be inspiring, dizzying, frightening, and/or illuminating. It is common both to reach for record heights and also to worry about falling abruptly into setbacks. At the same time, one can also question whether reaching high heights is even important at all.
The meaning of the parking lot lines is less clear, but the repetition of these lines suggests they are important. Perhaps crossing the parking lot represents a childhood goal that is literally horizontal and rather meaningless by adult standards. Regardless of the true importance of this goal, at some point it is replaced by the desire to climb higher and higher when “everything went vertical.”
Another clue about the parking lot is that while the lyrics include many beautiful images about nature, parking lots are considered to be unnatural and ugly. The child could initially be complaining about the ugliness of this parking lot and humanity’s impact on the environment that contributes to the lot's hot surface. When everything goes vertical, however, the child realizes that the parking lot is simply a result of society’s natural vertical growth, which is not unlike trees growing taller in nature.