In all the interpretations I've read of this song, I've yet to see anyone examine it from the broader context of the album, Artificial Heart.
JoCo's albums tend to include several songs that, put together, tell an overarching sci-fi story. This is a lot more obvious in his other album, Solid State, but I see a lot of story in Artificial Heart, too.
The title track is about a man who has part of his body replaced with artificial parts - assumably due to terminal illness ("they knew all along that there was something wrong with me"). It's clear that the narrator loses significant amount of his emotions in this process, and he seems to lose his sense of connection to the world around him and finds himself essentially a different person ("once I was him, but now he's me.")
It's also implied in Artificial Heart that the narrator has a partner/spouse, and he is going through the motions of a human relationship without sincerity ("You're happy again, I nod and pretend to think it through/I don't need to think at all if I don't care for you").
Several other songs in the album have themes of domestic life and unhappy or failing marriages that illustrate attempts to assimilate back into his old life (I think "Today With Your Wife" is from the perspective of the couple's otherwise uninvolved friend or family member).
So, I think "Nobody Loves You Like Me" is the conclusion of the story.
The narrator is struggling for control between his present sense of self and the remnants of the person he was before ("I'm all alone but I'm drinking for two/drowning the man that I used to be").
Meanwhile, his partner seems to regret the life-saving procedure that turned him into who he is now, realizing the man she loved died, after all ("out on the fire escape smoking all day/missing someone, now who could it be?") and intends to leave him.
Deep down, his human half still loves her, and feels intense grief at losing her while his new, improved mind is struggling to quash those unpleasant, irrational emotions.
I think the line "Nobody loves you like me" is fairly literal - the way he experiences love is now warped beyond what a human would recognize as love, a bone-deep sense of need and possessiveness he feels for his partner at odds with a machine heart that is incapable of actual affection or empathy. Nobody else is capable of love in the form in which he experiences it, so of course nobody loves her like he does.
As for the end, suicide is the obvious explanation, but I think it's a little more complicated than that.
He refers to distractions outside covering "my flight, my hero's retreat." What makes this heroic? My theory is that his machine's half solution to dealing with these uncomfortable emotions is to murder his partner, but the remains of his human consciousness manage to seize enough control to get himself away from her. He tears out the computerized parts that keep him alive at the expense of his humanity ("holes in the bellows and blood on the keys"), ultimately killing himself, not out of despair, but to keep the woman he loves safe.
Meanwhile, his partner will never know the sacrifice he made for her, and feels nothing to learn that he’s dead ("you move along/there's nothing to see,"). In his dying thought, the title phrase takes on a new meaning. "Nobody loves you like me" from the perspective of his fully human self, who can die happy with the knowledge he has protected her, even if she won't ever know it.
In all the interpretations I've read of this song, I've yet to see anyone examine it from the broader context of the album, Artificial Heart.
JoCo's albums tend to include several songs that, put together, tell an overarching sci-fi story. This is a lot more obvious in his other album, Solid State, but I see a lot of story in Artificial Heart, too.
The title track is about a man who has part of his body replaced with artificial parts - assumably due to terminal illness ("they knew all along that there was something wrong with me"). It's clear that the narrator loses significant amount of his emotions in this process, and he seems to lose his sense of connection to the world around him and finds himself essentially a different person ("once I was him, but now he's me.")
It's also implied in Artificial Heart that the narrator has a partner/spouse, and he is going through the motions of a human relationship without sincerity ("You're happy again, I nod and pretend to think it through/I don't need to think at all if I don't care for you").
Several other songs in the album have themes of domestic life and unhappy or failing marriages that illustrate attempts to assimilate back into his old life (I think "Today With Your Wife" is from the perspective of the couple's otherwise uninvolved friend or family member).
So, I think "Nobody Loves You Like Me" is the conclusion of the story.
The narrator is struggling for control between his present sense of self and the remnants of the person he was before ("I'm all alone but I'm drinking for two/drowning the man that I used to be").
Meanwhile, his partner seems to regret the life-saving procedure that turned him into who he is now, realizing the man she loved died, after all ("out on the fire escape smoking all day/missing someone, now who could it be?") and intends to leave him.
Deep down, his human half still loves her, and feels intense grief at losing her while his new, improved mind is struggling to quash those unpleasant, irrational emotions.
I think the line "Nobody loves you like me" is fairly literal - the way he experiences love is now warped beyond what a human would recognize as love, a bone-deep sense of need and possessiveness he feels for his partner at odds with a machine heart that is incapable of actual affection or empathy. Nobody else is capable of love in the form in which he experiences it, so of course nobody loves her like he does.
As for the end, suicide is the obvious explanation, but I think it's a little more complicated than that.
He refers to distractions outside covering "my flight, my hero's retreat." What makes this heroic? My theory is that his machine's half solution to dealing with these uncomfortable emotions is to murder his partner, but the remains of his human consciousness manage to seize enough control to get himself away from her. He tears out the computerized parts that keep him alive at the expense of his humanity ("holes in the bellows and blood on the keys"), ultimately killing himself, not out of despair, but to keep the woman he loves safe.
Meanwhile, his partner will never know the sacrifice he made for her, and feels nothing to learn that he’s dead ("you move along/there's nothing to see,"). In his dying thought, the title phrase takes on a new meaning. "Nobody loves you like me" from the perspective of his fully human self, who can die happy with the knowledge he has protected her, even if she won't ever know it.
[Edit: readability ]