The piano/keyboard drives the song, and then the sound bursts into a much bigger thing, several times, followed by that bouncing weird synth, which, to be honest, I cannot say I’m a fan of. But it is a relatively minor thing, the song is rocking as I said, and it sounds happy.
But the lyrics? I have not a clear idea of what they are about, so cryptic…
There is a lot of ‘Here it come/that heavy love/I’m never gonna move it alone’, and he mentions Sisyphus? Yes, Sisyphus knew a lot about heavy load but he kept doing it, he kept moving up that heavy load, like a blessed hope in an absurd future? I just like this line:
‘For the every man, blessed Sisyphus/Slipping steadily into madness, now that’s the only place to be free’
It is indeed the only way, the only way to continue living, even if we lose, even if it is a shell game, ‘a sheeeeeelll game’.
And Conor Oberst seems to believe in the future, he has been giving several interviews lately, talking a lot about science fiction and I have been looking very hard into the song to find anything related to anything of this sort… This is what he said in an interview for Spinner.com
‘Also, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the theory of singularity. This guy, Ray Kurzweil, who was the inventor of early synthesizers, he has this theory — a few other people write about it too — but essentially there’s a point where artificial intelligence reaches beyond human intelligence and we fuse in with the internet and become what he calls “spiritual machines.” Essentially, you stop having to die and stop having to eat. Our physical form is no longer important because you’re able to maintain your consciousness by uploading it to the next frame, which sounds spooky and weird but I think it’s 100% achievable, especially when you think about how fast new machines invent newer machines, which invent the newer machines. It’s exponential growth. A person doesn’t have to sit down and invent every one of these steps. His vision is really utopian, like this is the way forward. Humans, we’re obviously going to destroy our planet and destroy our physical form, but we’ll continue in this way.’
It’s spooky indeed, and I have read severe criticisms from the scientific community regarding Kurzweil’s ideas. But could it be what Conor means when he sings this?
‘We’ll be everything that we ever need
Everyone on the count of three
Everyone on the count of three
All together now’
May be I’m thinking too much, but all this talking about spiritual machines and new age spiritualism made me believe that Conor wants to score the next Tron movie.