I just Want You to Know Who I Am
Photo by Missy Kim
It can be tough being a lyrics person in a beats-driven world. Before I started writing Libations, the only humans I could subject to my song analysis were my children.
Person of Lyrics + Mother of 11 = Captive Audience of Annoyed Offspring
Don’t get me wrong—I freak out like the next music lover over a fresh bass line or a slick guitar riff. I wait with anticipation for “the drop.” But no matter how awesome the music might be, I always want to know what the lyrics are, and when there is a perfect marriage of the two, I lose it.
Exquisite Music + Profound, Poetic Lyrics = Ecstasy
Take “Iris,” by the Goo Goo Dolls, which makes my Existential Playlist cut and happens to have that synergistic magic that can only be created by the perfect marriage of music and lyrics. So many incredible lines in the verses, but the chorus kills me every time:
“And I don't want the world to see me
'Cause I don't think that they'd understand
When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am”
“Iris” from Dizzy Up the Girl, Goo Goo Dolls, 1998
And they wrote this BEFORE we had the onslaught of social media. Before we began sharing the happy, colorful bits of our lives with hundreds of online “friends.” Even so, the landscape of alienation he paints is familiar to us—one littered with the rusting relics of planned obsolescence and bathed in the phantasmal glow of electronic entertainment. And in this desolate landscape, he lays claim to a small, sacred space where he will reveal himself to another. He knows that love lives or dies on such revelations, but that they must be made or we will not be known, and that is more terrifying than rejection.
An alien race might encounter these lyrics someday and wonder at such desperation to be known. By one person. It sounds like such a little thing. But to us humans, it feels like everything.
(Human + Self Revelation)^2 x Acceptance^2 = Love^∞
Tales From the Liminal now available as an audiobook on all your favorite platforms!
