Category: Listening (Page 1 of 5)

If you don’t know this song listen to it. Now. Just listen. It’s beautiful. Or you could read the lyrics and approach it as a poem. It’s deserving.

I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this song. It’s not getting old to me at all. I’ve been listening to it for at least 8 years, and it keeps getting better and better. This song keeps revealing more of itself to me as the years go by. I’ve even read a few other critiques and commentary about it, and I think they’re fair and (almost?) accurate, but I think they were based on people with limited listens.

I’m sorry, but this song just can’t be properly considered with only two or three years worth of listening–not by someone with my limited aptitude. Your mileage my vary. As I peel the onion back, I have to conclude that either Evan Felkner is an absolute genius, or I’m wasting my time uncovering clues and meaning that were never intentionally left. Radio silence on Evan’s part right now, so I’m going with the former.

So I just want to break down one little section of the song that took me down a rabbit hole. It’s the ambiguous placement of the words “I guess” in the leadup to the chorus. On the first few listens, it seems like it’s simply a way to find a rhyme with “loneliness”. But if you listen closely, “I guess” is a phrase used to bridge two statements, and there’s some ambiguity as to which statement “I guess” goes with.

When he sings it, it’s spaced like a run on sentence:

I’ve been livin’ with the loneliness.

It’s got down in my bones I guess it’s just another phase of bein’ free.

So, does he mean it like this?

I’ve been livin’ with the loneliness.

It’s got down in my bones I guess.

It’s just another phase of bein’ free.

Or does he mean it like this?

I’ve been livin’ with the loneliness.

It’s got down in my bones.

I guess it’s just another phase of bein’ free.

Why does it even matter? Well, because one thing is a definite statement, while the other is the narrator’s supposition. It all depends on how you read/hear it.

This weighed on my mind for a while. Yes, I do have more pressing issues, but there’s no harm in taking some time to appreciate someone else’s hard work/art and trying to understand it on the level it deserves. I went back and forth on what he meant, and I landed on the second reading as the answer.

I was happy to have some resolution, and I decided to listen to the full song again with this little piece of knowledge.

As I was listening, I realized I’d been swerved. Everything else that’s revealed to us in the song just didn’t add up to my conclusion. This guy is a screw up. He doesn’t know anything.

That’s when my mind was blown. I think Evan meant it both ways–he’s just a damn efficient song writer. “I guess” works as both the end of one line and as the beginning of another. It would be read like this in prose:

I’ve been livin’ with the loneliness.

It’s got down in my bones I guess.

I guess it’s just another phase of bein’ free.

He’s “guessing” about the whole situation. Just listen to the end of the song…

Guess her folks were right. Guess her folks were right. Guess her folks were right.

Also, when he says, “I had good intentions ’til I had to many. I was stupid I suppose”. And then there’s “Good Lord Lorrie I love you, could it go more wrong?”

This dude is “guessing” and “supposing” all over the place. Could it go more wrong? He doesn’t know. Even Lorrie herself says, “I wonder what we went through all this trouble for.” Between the two of them, there’s lots of wondering, guessing, and supposing.

Maybe you have to have truly been in love to understand the absolute certainty that you were absolutely meant to be together.

But these two? They don’t have that certainty. Nothing revealed in the song anywhere reveals any kind of certainty existing between them. It never did.

He’s “learning how to lose a thing he never laid a hand on”.

The only thing that is certain is that none of their relationship was ever certain.