Evaporated

You know the songs that you can hear for years and they can still hit you like some sort of revelation when you listen to them? like this one. That makes you register a songmeanings.net account, hehe.

Somebody said, in one of the first posted comments, that they couldn't say they related the lyrics because it would be ungrateful for them to complain about their life; I can identify with that feeling but I don't think it can be applied to this song. Because it's not about life, not about the hand he's been dealt or anything he's been put through or any relationship/situation...it's just about him. looking at himself. When time has just slipped away and he's been living in a blur, a dreamworld; not really keeping himself in check or control but going with the flow of routines and habits and swept in crowds and then when you wake up from a heavy night before and that night might have just as well been the past few years. Or pretty much your whole life. and you just start to wonder where the hell all that time went and how you got where you are. and wish that you cared, that things meant something to you, things that would have once upon a time. and that you were and had been appreciating life as it passed. but it seems too late. that you've gone too far to come back and done irrepairable damage. and also noticing how comparable you are to your parent now you've blinked and missed a trick and suddenly you're a grown up and forgot to keep your wits about you and make sure you take the right off-turnings to make sure that you didn’t. it's completely summed up in the last line - "Oh god, what have I done?", but I would never say elaborating on it with the rest of the song was unnecessary. nononononono no never!

It's pretty sad to be able to say that I feel the way he describes at 20 years old (and not just of late, either) but i'm sure I'm not the only one there. I’d be tempted to say I bet maybe everyone will feel like this at least once, unfortunately. It is an outstanding song, I agree it deserves to get a look in for anyone who thinks Brick is as good as Ben Folds Five get. just to mention a few lines...

"woke up way too late" – not just emerging from a drunken slumber too late in the day, I don’t think, coming round to his senses and looking around and questioning where he is too late in life.

“what I’ve kept with me and what I’ve thrown away” – thoughts that have been with me a lot at the moment, I’m just scraping through the last bit of a fairly disastrous (but all experience is good experience of course!) college course and my tutor said some pretty thought-provoking things to me when I tried to throw the towel in a few weeks ago – about covering up tracks after you where you go, and that people shouldn’t, it’s important to see where you’ve been to understand how you got where you are. Which isn’t a point of view I can share, I’m desperate to obliterate a lot of history, but I can sort of see what he means – people grow and they change and they move out of a room and look at their old belongings and memories, and throw away what seems silly or embarrassing or just not important enough to be cluttering up your life when you want to move free ‘n’ easy…but one day you’re almost bound to want to remember something and wish you hadn’t got rid of every souvenir that could have allowed you too. Which adds to the waking up one day an adult and not really understanding how it happened.

“Blind man at a canyon's edge of a panoramic scene” - the world is impressive. It’s beautiful. It’s marvellous, it’s breathtaking. But if you’re feeling as utterly detached and displaced as this song describes, it’s very difficult to actually appreciate it, even though you know that it deserves recognition, and that is would-be frustrating. You’re not sure when you stopped paying attention to the world around you, but it’s escaping you and then it feels you don’t deserve to be in it.

Sorry to go on so long, please understand I’m fundamentally incapable of explaining things in short! Hope that’s rung some bells with anybody who’s interested tho, as if the song itself didn’t sounds clearly enough. Absolute stunner from Mr Folds here, I can’t thank him more.