Personal Interpretations of Songs

Say, have you folks ever listened to a song and come up with an interpretation of what it's about, that most people wouldn't come up with?

For example, I've always seen The Boys Are Back In Town as being both upbeat and a little sad, because I always imagine the singer as talking to a friend of theirs who is dead - like, speaking to their grave. Dunno if that was intentional or not.

I get that sort of thing a fair bit - how about you?

I got into Ladytron when I was having trouble with amphetamines.

"Predict the Day" on the album Velocifero is interpreted by me as binging on amphetamines. The type of binge that you want to stop.

It even made me start to cry and I rarely ever do that.

Lessee, Taylor Swift's "You Belong with Me" is about a Stalker with a Crush, The Beatles' "Michelle" is about a man who falls for someone he don't hardly know while on vacation in a foreign country, Phineas And Ferb's "Gitchee Gitchee Goo" is about an actual baby, The Who's "This Song is Over" is about the singer being in denial and trying to, well, deny that...I'd answer yes to your query, fine sir.

Oh, and The Turtles' "Happy Together" is a menacing Villain Song, sung by the villain to his captive that he has kidnapped.

edited 24th Jan '12 3:32:21 PM by 0dd1

I seem to be in the minority for thinking Sufjan Stevens' "Sister Winter" is about seasonal depression rather than a breakup.

I also always felt an oddly sad undercurrent to "The Boys Are Back In Town" - to me it's almost more like the narrator is living vicariously through "the boys". Despite the fact that he clearly talks to them at some point in the song, I don't see him as being with the boys - I mean, if he were that close with them, he'd have left town right with them in the first place. So, I picture him mostly sitting over at the end of the bar watching their exploits, because he has little going on himself. Maybe he's a married man who's too old to join in on their carousing and antics, maybe he's just too timid to live that kind of life.

They Might Be Giants' "Dr. Worm" and "Experimental Film" are both about the same person, who has Fleeting Passionate Hobbies - basically both are about someone who's only just started with an artistic activity and are already convinced they're going to do something great, so I imagine this is one guy who started playing drums, gave up on it after a couple months, and decided he was really destined to be a film-maker.

edited 25th Jan '12 1:18:08 AM by MikeK

"High School Confidental" by Jerry Lee Lewis will never cease to be The Creepiest Song Of All Time for me, in large part because of JLL's own, err, personal life.

Could "Old Pine Box" be what happens after he's exhausted every other hobby he could think of?

I remember seeing something in the troper tales page for Accidental Nightmare Fuel about someone taking "Invisible Touch" by Genesis entirely too literally when they heard it as a kid. So now I think of that song as being about a woman who uses her invisible hands to rip your internal organs out... and I like it better that way:

She seems to have an invisible touch yeah
She reaches in, grabs a hold of your heart
She seems to have an invisible touch yeah
It takes control and slowly tears you apart

edited 14th Feb '12 11:26:12 AM by MikeK

I like to think Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" is about a guy from Nazi Germany who just wants to be special, and took a Jew badge, thinking it had a special meaning. He thought he "ruled the world", but his "castles" stood upon "pillars of salt and pillars of sand" (the true negative symbolism). He tried to make excuses ("People couldn't believe what I've become/Revolutionaries wait..."), but he knew deep down that it was a genocide ("Just a puppet on a lonely string/Aw, who would ever want to be king").

I get that "Hotel California'' isn't really about some Satanic cult that lures in and abducts travelers, but how else am I supposed to be creeped out by it?

It always seemed to me that We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions centered around treating sports as Serious Business on par with war.

edited 21st Mar '13 9:08:28 PM by Robotnik

tool's "Pushit", to me, is about a relationship where the man is being (or at least feels like he's being) emotionally and/or psychologically abused/manipulated by the woman, and she is using sex as a weapon against him.

I always figured it was about some kind of alternate dimension that the singer becomes trapped in.

edited 22nd Mar '13 6:11:27 AM by Willbyr

I've always found something ineffably sad about the Beach Boys' music. Their songs have a kind of wistful undercurrent that make me feel like they're happening in the mind of a sad old man, sitting in a California dive bar, nursing the latest in a long line of drinks, and recalling happiness, friends, & loves that are long, long gone. "Nostalgia" in the most precise sense of the word.

edited 22nd Mar '13 11:44:58 AM by Jhimmibhob

As I posted to the ACDC wmg, I developed this silly theory that in "You Shook Me All Night Long", this guy is getting his wife (or long-time girlfriend) jealous by telling her all about this sexy woman he met and took home once, then in the chorus he reveals that he was just teasing and was actually talking about the first time he met her. This whole idea came up because someone pointed out how the lyrics keep talking about the subject of the song in the third person (e.g. "She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean..."), and yet it isn't "She Shook Me All Night Long".

edited 23rd Mar '13 9:41:37 AM by MikeK

I recall having a theory that all of Alestorm's songs took place in the same universe [said theory can be found in the WMG page], telling about the misadventures of the same crew as time passes by.

The big theory points being that "The Huntmaster" is about Captain Morgan from Captain Morgan's Revenge and that the narrator from "Chronicles Of Vengenace" became the narrator from "Pirate Song", while the captured crew from "Chronicles" became the about-to-be-hanged crew from "Captain Morgan's Revenge".

Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory is about a woman who's on the edge of a mental breakdown and is trying to hold onto her lover because he's the only thing keeping her from completely losing it.

We Are Young by Fun. isn't meant to be some "We're young life is awesome let's have fun and set the world on fire", it's a guy who's young and thinks he should feel that life is awesome and fun, but is unable to and is completely bitter about the fact.

It's actually supposed to be about a formerly abusive boyfriend who encounters his ex in a bar, I believe. So either way, it's not supposed to be happy-fun-times.

Really? Interesting. That actually makes a lot of sense.

Hmmm. I tend to agree about The Boys Are Back In Town. It has the vibe of being sung by a guy who never left his old stomping ground, never saw the world. He still hangs around the same old places remembering what things used to be like before the fun people went on to bigger and better things.

Viva La Vida was, I figured, simply about the fate that almost always befalls revolutuionary leaders in the long run.

I have a friend who said the following about "Why" by Jason Aldean:

And the song he feels so strongly is about abuse?

Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer", especially in The Ataris' cover of it, always makes me think of summer in the early to mid-2000s, around when California-sounding pop-punk was really popular. I only really first heard it about two or three years ago, but for some reason, it always takes me back to around then. In general, it just sounds like an absurdly nostalgic song. Henley has said the song is about aging and questioning the past more so than nostalgia, but I would argue that those can't really be separated from the idea of nostalgia too easily. And while I'm not exactly old (20 right now), I'm not exactly getting any younger. Soon enough, I'll be out of college, out on my own, and that, in a way, depresses me, especially since I thought the path to there would be so much different than it has been so far. Too many things I could've done, should have or shouldn't have done, choices I regret and choices I couldn't imagine not making.

*sigh* Well, that was depressing.

"A little voice inside my head said, 'Don't look back—you can never look back.' "

edited 24th Mar '13 6:08:51 PM by 0dd1

I guess I have a thing for deciding all songs about partying are secretly kind of depressing? Now I've come to the conclusion that Abba's "Dancing Queen" is about an aging former party girl who tries to relive her past by going out to dance clubs. And somehow I came to that conclusion while listening to a silly, "ironic" version of the song by a band featuring Johnny Depp and the singer from Butthole Surfers:

edited 30th Mar '13 12:42:53 PM by MikeK

Pestilence's "Chemo Therapy" always struck me as being increasingly less about disease and more about the fear of the inevitable end and the increasingly desperate measures people go to try to save themselves and otherwise "deny" it. Ultimately, these measure harm and bring them closer to it more than helping them.

edited 30th Mar '13 12:24:33 PM by StillbirthMachine