Yet

“All attempts have failed, all my heads are tails.” What do you do about that? If that’s you, what can you do? Well the easy and bad answer is give up. The hard answer is to start over completely. The last thing you could do is figure out how to use what you’ve got to make it right. Several places in this album (Hello Hurricane), Jon does a good job of describing, much more dramatically than I, this situation and how the solution he chose was the latter.

The second verse basically underlines this theme of everything being backwards, but it’s an interesting array of words. “These days pass me by, I dream with open eyes. Nightmares haunt my days, visions blur my nights.” This most likely is just an awesome way to describe how life can be backwards, but I’d like to suppose, in my wildest imagination, what it could mean. Dreaming with open eyes… dreams are things our minds throw together in a boggle sort of way. Dreaming can also be having dreams or ambitions, and chasing those dreams. Imagine if your life was spent living out your dream, and you could see your dreams take form right before your eyes. I just asked you to imagine something, please do it. Imagine yourself in a dreamy state thinking about your wildest ambitions. Picture them solidifying into reality as you watch. Sounds pretty fantastic. This could have some merit to it, but it’s not exactly in step with the message of the rest of the song. Oh well, one can dream.

The last line in both the first verse adds a bit of “the end is near” to the “everything’s messed up” ideas from the rest of the verses. It goes, “I’m heading for the final precipice”. What better to add to dilemma than urgency? Time is limited, and we all know that bad things happen when we always think there’ll be more time later. I’m not sure what the urgency is, but we can all relate. Chapters in life end, and sometimes these chapters find us in situations that will only exist in this chapter. When we let the pages of life pass us by until the chapter is over, we regret things. “Live life with no regrets” could probably be best explained as try to live life intentionally and do what you want to do as opposed to sitting back and watching life blow by in the breeze.

“I’ll sing until my heart caves in”. This isn’t settling in for retirement, this is fighting for what you believe in until death do you and the world part. “I’m holding on, I’m holding on to you.” I think of all the possible mentions of God in Switchfoot songs, this one’s hard to ignore (especially when you look at it in the full context). Ok you got me, this is from the next song on Hello Hurricane, but it fits wonderfully and I believe it helps to illustrate the meaning of this song. While Jon reveals how all of his life is messed up and crazy, he further shows that it doesn’t matter what’s happening to him, he’s going to hold on to the one thing he knows, and devote his everything to that. With Everything, he will sing.

Bridge time, “If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love.” At first, I thought it was silly to think that all love breaks your heart, but then I challenged my own definition of what it means to break a heart. I guess it means what you use it to mean. I don’t think it should be limited to being super sad after a girlfriend or boyfriend dumps you. Now it gets personal… The biggest moment of my life was when I devoted my life to God and to be more like Jesus (literally becoming a Christ-ian). I don’t care if that sounds Christian-machine generated, it’s true. I experienced a love I’d never truly known before. That sent my emotions on a wild stampede with the final destination of awesome. If our hearts represent our state of emotions, or perhaps their structure and how they operate, then to break one’s heart opens up the possibility of reforming it. So maybe what happened to me was that perfect love broke my heart and was able to realign it more properly. In no way is this a bad thing.

So now that it makes sense, how about the specifics of his claim, “If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love.” If you asked, I might tell you I love my guitar, but it would be in the same sense that I love ice cream. If it was stolen, I’d be upset and frustrated… after all, I spent my own money on that, and it wasn’t exactly cheap. But in the end, whatever. If my mom died… well I’d be a wreck. I wouldn’t properly function for quite a while. Love is powerful. Real love, when taken away, is a heartbreaker. But it’s worth it, it has to be. If nothing else, it’s a taste of what pure love is, what God’s love is. And He never withdraws His love if you ask for it. So to come full circle, love breaks your heart, whether in a good constructive way or a sad (and hopefully character building) way.

All in all, thanks to Switchfoot for being able to pack so much awesome in so few words. Sorry for sort of ignoring the musical part on this one. Basically, the music does a good job of reading you the lyrics in bold.