Like a hurricane or a tidal wave or something… she sweeps me off my feet and there’s no way that she’s going to go unnoticed even in a crowded room.

As Incubus put it:

This party is cold and uninviting
Participants all in black and white
You enter in full-blown Technicolor
Nothing is the same after tonight

I try not to be too much of a dick. It’s obvious that this song is tongue-in-cheek, but still, I have a bit of reverse snobbery about me sometimes. I try to remember what Max Bemis warns his listener to avoid:

It’s the same superiority complex
Shared by the high school jocks who made your life a living hell
And makes you a slave to the competitive capitalist dogma
You spend every moment of your waking life bitching about

Life is short and tomorrow might be your last day. So stop fucking around and connect with the person you want to connect with. It’s that simple!

Sometimes I’m unabashedly snobby and think I know better than everyone else. Everytime I sing this line I think of this line in Mean Girls…

…which is exactly how I feel when I walk into a classroom full of teenagers. Minus the pink tracksuit.

In my experience a lot of people I don’t actually talk to much because they don’t like talking about politics, religion, or real emotion… or anything real. Alli and I have scared off many people by talking about things that are too “heavy” for most people’s tastes.

Once we were at a bar, and were just talking about, what percentage of the world is Muslim? What percentage is Catholic? but the people we were with got completely freaked and left early. And I have no idea how to talk to people like that… that particular couple weren’t necessarily “douchebags,” but they certainly weren’t very interesting. I look at people from my generation just out getting wasted all the time and have no idea how to react. Like… when do these people have conversations? Read books?

Maybe I’m rude when I refuse to talk about banal shit and would rather talk about the stuff that losers sweep under the rug and ignore… but fuck it, I’m in love.

Fact: my wife was voted “Most Mysterious” in her high school yearbook, and that’s what I’m referencing here.

Sometimes you meet someone that seems exactly perfect for you and tailor-made is as good a way as any to describe it; later in the song I describe her in a similarly sartorial way. It’s sortof a pun on Taylor guitars, too.

I’m “Hades-sent” as in a synonym for Hell, because I have definitely been a troubling influence on Alli’s life from time to time, however much she loves me. And when I sing this line I can’t help but picture the Disney Hades…

In actuality Alli has followed me around the country more than her fair share. But this about looking to someone as a guiding star in your life, when you’re lost without this person.

Another way to put it is from my song “Blue Öyster Schmaltz”:

Like a moth before flame, consumed by all that you do

I live in a First Nations community in Nord-du-Québec, so the issue of Aboriginal self-determination, sovereignty, and land rights come up often. Back down south, my friends don’t have a point of reference, or worse, they have prejudices against First Nations people and run through the whole “I’m-not-racist-but” routine.

The second part of the line refers to our discovery of Judaism. Alli was raised in the United Church and me Baptist, but it just never spoke to us like this beautiful faith. Conversion is a long and sometimes vexing process but we attended synagogue regularly before moving up north while the rest of our generation was out getting bombed.