Faust, Midas, and Myself

If you’ve never heard this one before, you should listen to it, it’s fantastic, one of my favorites for sure. If you have heard it before or are just lazy, listen to the first three notes. They should tell you all you need to know about the general mood of the song. Eerie, dreamy, and almost sad, in the way that a rainy day is sad.

This song could be a novel. It has quite a story packed into a 4-ish minute song. It’s about direction, temptation, and internal warfare/struggle. A bit of background … Faust comes from a story of this guy, Faust, who basically sells his soul to the devil in return for power, magic, whatever. Midas is the king who turned anything he touched into gold. Myself is good ol’ Jon Foreman (the writer).

So the song opens in describing a dream where this guy follows him (the writer) home and is mad sketchy. He proceeds to offer (I’m just going to call the main character of this story Jon, whether it is about himself or not) Jon anything he could ever dream of wanting. The song then offers the statement, “You’ve one life left to lead”, introducing the idea of direction in life to this so tempting offer. Now it gets interesting. Jon describes waking up from this dream to a world where everything is gold… and it scares him. “I don’t think this is me. Is this just a dream or really happening?” Then it goes back into “You’ve one life left to lead”. Then it explodes, sort of in the way that some life lessons hit you like a ton of bricks, into “WHAT DIRECTION?” and “I’M SPLITTING UP, THIS IS MY PERSONAL DISAFFECTION”. Would you really want to have everything you touch become gold? Midas did, look where that got him; he ended up hating his “gift”. His food turned to inedible gold, and his daughter to a golden statue. It’s sort of like being mega rich but being alone… it’s not worth it. Jon realizes that if he were to embrace this offer of anything he could ever want, he’d be left alone, with only temporary pleasures to accompany him. The next verse continues describing a world of gold and how it’s affecting Jon, “I hated what I saw, my golden eyes were dead, a thought passed through my head, a heart that’s made of gold can’t really beat at all.”

Gold comes up a lot in this song, and it’s perfect. Gold is very pretty, and rare enough for it to be valuable… but what do we do with it? We look at it. To me, gold represents a sort of shallowness. Would you be happy with all the gold in the world? King Solomon had gold … sooo much gold. Did he stare at it all day long and marvel at his wealth? He used a lot of it to build a temple for God. It was a sacrifice of his wealth; the point being that honoring God is more worthy than any possible amount of gold.

“I wanted to wake up again, without a touch of gold” followed by a dreamy chorus of “what direction” lines. This leads into another explosion of sorts with “LIFE BEGINS AT THE INTERSECTION!” That is one of my favorite Switchfoot lines, I think I’ll come back to it later. This bridge for me is an awakening, in both senses. It’s followed with a wonderful verse, “I woke up as before, but the gold was gone. My wife was at the door with a night robe on. My heart beat once or twice, and life flooded my veins. Everything had changed, my lungs had found their voice, and what was once routine was now the perfect joy.” For starters, I like how the first time he said “I woke up from my dream”, he was actually dreaming, and this time he really woke up… at least that’s how I took it. We humans adjust to things. If the water’s cold, don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. We notice change. When you wear glasses all the time don’t notice they’re there until they think about it or take them off. When we have a good life, we get used to it and can find ourselves wanting more. In this song, Jon struggles with direction, and in the end, concludes that his life as he had it was the “perfect joy”. The end, awwww.

“Life begins at the intersection” is one of my favorite lines because it’s so simple and deep (at least, deep relative to how deep my mind is able to go). If you live a preset life, are you really living? If you only do things because they’re what society/peers suggest you should do … you’re more of a sheep than a human being. Life begins when you make a choice, when you decide, “that path is where I’m going to go”. If you just go through routine day after day, if you go through motions blindly, are you really living?