I think part of what gets me about this song is the loneliness at the core of it. A timely element of this song is that there are thousands of people sick of being trapped in their homes right now, living the joys, sorrows and many panics under a single expanse of ceiling. But for me it’s more than a collective loneliness of the moment.
This song taps into my teenhood of yearning in the suburbs, an in-between of age and place, caught in wanting to be somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere better, but an inevitable fear or anxiety over making the move. It taps into solitary dinners and lunches in cafes and diners in college, studying alone in my room for weeks, only to go to weekend parties to feel absolutely isolated in a room full of lust-addled reverie. There is the enforced distance from our loved ones and our friends now, but even in the beforetimes, loneliness thrived in the little distances been an individual and everyone around them. There is the great expanse between knowing that you didn’t need to be alone and the possibility of intimacy, only closed by every action the loneliness reminds you to be too afraid to take.
And what other emotionally intense analogy is there but a romantic relationship?
Okay, I’ll never finish the draft so my ideas in bullets:
*Pop songs can sometimes feel constrained by their structures, but this song uses the repetition of structure to reinforce the idea of distance, because the thing about distance is that, often, it’s an illusion. I’ve been interested in how gestalt principles play a part in tricking our minds into these optical illusions, and how structures get manipulated in our minds into flippable meanings
*Yearning for romantic relationships is that elegant balance over pinpoint of being with someone and being alone, and how the idea of the former sharpens the ache of the latter
*The agony of the uncertainty, the unanswered questions, fear holding you back from even your closest confidantes, and the intimacy of a familiar safe place, where you’re honest but also
*Talking to the moon vs the sun, suggesting a time difference, a long distance relationship,
*but also the need to vent, to release all these secret unspokens. Finding release in things that cannot respond, to confide in things that only listen — needing to vent but needing to
*the idea of the response of disinterest from the ceiling, analogous and closer maybe, than screaming to the void of the endless sky.
*Robbie’s verse is my favourite. Something about the mirror, turning to yourself for answers you can’t find, in the same way you’re confined in your mind unable to reach answers, trapped in the same constant wondering
*The line “ if you’re moving on, if you are, what’s your secret?”
*The REGRET because you didn’t admit how you feel, and still hoping the other person is hurting too because even if you’re alone, there’s something in knowing and recognizing the loneliness in someone else. lonely together.
