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1. Vibrant Way

The author recognizes his flaws, and the vibrant way in which he screws things up. He has had it too easy in life, and has a lack of empathy for hardship. Even though by some miracle the people around him are supportive, he doesn’t work with them to better himself. He ponders whether its better for him to keep trying, or just get as far away from people as possible, as to not disappoint/offend anybody else. His one saving grace is the love that he has to give, which is sincere. 

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2. Find The Priest

Song making fun of the self-destructiveness of young people who are too anxious to get married. “Please tell me there’s a priest somewhere in the room” is a hyperbole- they are actively looking around for a priest to marry them that second.  They don’t know each other as well as they think, and just as quickly as they get together they forget what they love about each other. 

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3. Ex Is Gone

Despite not wanting to be with her anymore, you wish the best for your Ex. You realize that sometimes, no matter what you do to avoid it, you will have to break people’s hearts throughout your life. And the only way for them to move on and find happiness is on their own/from within (“No I can’t walk you down the hall, I think you’ve got to walk alone”). In other words, you can’t hold yourself accountable for other people’s happiness. This song also stresses that even though a relationship has ended, the memories should have no less happiness/bliss attached to them. They should last forever as untainted snapshots, and you can still love and appreciate that person through them, regardless of the fact that you could never be happy together forever.  

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$. Sand And Pocket Lint

I think in a different way and have different things that make me happy than most people, perhaps because I am young and have unpredictable values. I am obsessed with little/”unimportant” things that most people overlook (see: sand and pocket lint). But I can’t tell somebody my reasoning, because it doesn’t matter what MY dreams are. Nobody will connect with my personal motive. People use me to make themselves happy, which at it’s core is a faulty way of going about happiness. We shouldn’t go about happiness this way, because nomatter what happens to us, we still have our own mind to come home to forever (see: “sun burnt skin will peel away.. but my deepest thoughts are here to stay”) The ending is mocking the world/people for pointlessly trying to make me do shit that time and time again hasn’t worked out. At the end I am (jokingly, but also seriously because I’m not quite sure what I want) telling them to just try harder and maybe I’ll acquiesce.

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5. Illuminate Me

In the literal sense, this song is a narrative about a childhood event, and a conversation with my parents about it. I am recalling a time when I was young and there was a violent fight that broke out in a crowd at an amusement park. All I saw were countless people crowded around the “action,” and I maybe caught one second long glimpse or two of what was happening. I recall seeing a couple of worked up people and a knife hit the ground. To this day I don’t know what it was but assume it was a fight involving a knife. I wanted to see more but my parents quickly rushed me away. As a kid I remember begging them to explain what happened but they wouldn’t say anything about it. In a deeper sense, this song is about being young and not getting to see the fucked up shit happening in front of you, but knowing that it must be really fucked up. It explores human nature and parental shame/sheltering.- your parents hide societies actions from you because they are ashamed of their peers. No kid should have to see this stuff, but instinctually every kid wants to see it. But when is it best to tell your kid what’s going on accurately, and when is it better to shelter? Would you rather them be scarred, or clueless? Aren’t they going to find out for themselves anyway?

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6. Summer Skin

At the surface, a song about how the end of summer creeps up on him while he is enjoying it most. He loves everything about it, and would miss it greatly if it were over. It feels like he lives and dies with summer, so if he is still alive, there must be some trace of Summer left. Ultimately a song about getting ready for the next season of life. “Can we do this when we’re old” - laying down in the middle of the road is just one thing that seems acceptable at a young age, but wrong and irresponsible when you grow up. How many other things are coming to an end that you’ll never be able to do again?

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7. Waiting Room

In my young age and good fortune, I’ve yet to experience someone close to me (like a parent, sibling, wife, or girlfriend) waiting for a fatal diagnosis. This is such a unique situation to me, because you know you are going to lose somebody, but they are still there with you for the time being. The sorrow attached to an inevitable loss must be profound, and I imagine that it is different than other types of grief. When I picture losing somebody that close to me, aside from being terrified I imagine being flooded with the memories of our existence together, and an overwhelming feeling of love for them. But perhaps I wouldn’t know what to think. In any case, the poetry of two souls waiting in a room together for their ultimate departure is beautiful to me, and I tried to express this complex situation sonically in Waiting Room. 

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8. Rainy Song

Song about how humans are made to be sad, and we let it weigh us down. If you broke me into tiny flakes of stone, not a single piece would be light enough to float. By human nature, grief is also contagious, and when those around us are sad, we lose some vigor as well. The things that we love most and that make us the happiest, are ultimately the greatest sources of our grief. The more you have the more you have to lose, so love and friendship becomes a ticking time bomb- is it better to be lonely from the start, or to eventually suffer great loss? No matter what you choose, life always moves forward through the wreckage. 

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9. Don't You Stop Me

Song about anxieties and depressions- after all your hard work, right at the last minute it seems like the world is trying to stop you from reaching you end goal, or maybe YOU are the thing holding you back from your goal. The person in the song fights with the faulty side of his own brain, begging it to stay out of his way

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10. The Drawer

A song about the perils of being young and overwhelmed. Throughout college I watched my peers (and myself) suffer the underestimated responsibilities of college work, and I watched the destructive way in which they coped with their struggle. But what are we to do? Because nomatter what you think, or what people tell you, it will never be over. We constantly look for that next benchmark where everything will be done and the stress will pass (“as soon as I’m out of highschool”, “as soon as this semester is over”, “once I graduate college”, “once I’m financially stable”). But If we listen to the voice that tells us to “wait for the better times”, we will find ourselves at the end, having waited our entire lives. 

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11. Tired Eyes

Things are the way they are regardless of our existence, and regardless of whether we see them or not. The natural world doesn’t have a preference whether or not you stay alive. The world will provide for you, but it takes effort on your part to exist, and eventually we grow tired of existence. If we are at peace with the inevitability of the universe, our passing is a beautiful thing to be thought about with nostalgia, sense of humor, appreciation, and continuity - not sorrow, anger, and denial. But no matter how you deal with it- you’ll die anyway. The universe will roll you under the high tide, and use you to fuel the next cycle. 

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