Choklit Blog #30: "Fiction" by Kids in the Way

This song didn’t make sense to me at all the first time I read the lyrics. Like I had no idea what it was about at all... until I read an interview somewhere that I vaguely remember, where KITW lead singer Dave Pelsue kind of explained the song. But of course, kind of explaining isn’t good enough for me. I have to know why each line was put in the song, and until I know that, I just can’t be happy and will be depressed and no I won’t really. Anyway.

In most of my song analyses, I start at the beginning of the song and explain each line until I reach the end of the song. I wanna start off with my basic understanding of the song, so as not to confuse people. Cool?

I think that this song is about trying to write your own reality. For example, lots of people try to be someone they’re not naturally because they’re not happy with reality. They want to write the story of their lives instead of living out the amazing story God has written and branded into their minds because He knows how to make their lives better than they can by themselves. Some people try to play God in their own world and change their personalities, their tastes, and their whole lives. That’s what the song is about... “We’re making fiction of our lives”... living in a fictitious, dangerous lie we’ve written.

So, the first verse starts with “I had the strangest dream, you were lost at sea / I found you drowning on the ocean floor” (1-2). The dreaming the mention here isn’t like “I feel asleep and saw something totally random that I had no control over” dreaming. It’s daydreaming. [Warning: This may get confusing right about now.] The speaker is daydreaming that he’s someone else... his true self is “lost at sea” and slowly dying (“drowning on the ocean floor”) so he can be someone else. In the next four lines, he says “I woke from my deep sleep to end the misery / And found you lying outside of my door / I tried to wake you up, to shake you up / And found out you were dead” (3-6). He comes to the realization that he’s losing himself and that he’s not really the person he’s trying to become, but he’s been faking for so long that he doesn’t remember who he really is. He finishes off the verse with “Like a leaf in the wind, you left me standing alone / To face the demons in my head” (7-8). The part about “a leaf in the wind” illustrates how easy it is to get sucked in by the desire to gain complete control of yourself. How hard is it for a leaf to blow away in the wind? Yeah. Exactly. The “demons in my head” are the false realities he’s created for himself. He let himself die to the truth and turn his life into a lie, and now he’s trying to get back but can’t figure out how to do that.

And now we come to the chorus. I love this song, by the way. Just in case anyone was wondering. “We’re making fiction of our lives” (9). I think I pretty well covered what that means. “Burning pages as we write” (10). When we try to make up our own reality, we’re never satisfied with our work, causing us to keep changing things until we’ve destroyed ourselves. “We read the lies between the lines” (11). Most of the world doesn’t typically encourage people to be true to themselves and lives the lives they were created for. It throws lies at us, telling us we need to be like someone else, and we’ve listened to them. “These dead letters won’t survive” (12). We’ve taken our own lives away; our fake selves will eventually crash and burn. “A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who pours out lies will not go free” Proverbs 19:5 (NIV).

One more thing I wanna point out about the chorus. The verse is all about “me”... the speaker. In the chorus, that changes. It starts off sounding like a personal song... possibly Dave’s way of being more down-to-earth and not sounding judgmental; introducing the conflict as a personal problem he has. But in the chorus he’s kind of saying, “Hey guess what. You’re doing the same thing! A lot of people have this problem, and you need to see that so you can fix it.”

And now on to verse two. “A dusty record spins, an old song plays again / The needle dragging across its skin / Ink spills through my pen, the paper soaks it in / The music bringing tremors to my hands” (13-16). In the first two lines, he’s just kind of saying “Here we go again. The same old thing as always.” The word “dragging” in line 14 kind of caught my attention... if that line had said something like “The needle moving across its skin” or “The needle sliding across its skin”, it would have definitely lost some of the affect. It really adds to the whole “This is super boring and lame” factor. In the next two lines, he clearly states that he is writing. Duh. But of course, that’s a metaphor. I love metaphors. The music he mentions “bringing tremors to my hands” is the influences on his life that are effecting the changes in his fake self that he’s creating here. This part reminds me of the “burning pages as we write” line from the chorus. It just shows that he’s been writing for a long long time, getting very bored with it, but he must keep writing because he’s not yet satisfied. Write a page. Not good enough. Burn it. And so on.

He continues verse two with “I can’t just give you up, just lift you up / To chance on a dragonfly’s wings / With my love in the wind / You left me standing alone / Hoping it brings you back to me” (17-21). I get this mental image when I read this of someone standing on the side of a cliff. They have some insanely important object that needs to be taken across a ridiculously large canyon to someone on the other side. Imagine that you’re this person. [No, I am not encouraging you to pretend that you are this person or to become this person. Just imagine it for a second. You can come back to reality when we’re done. I promise.] Would you just toss this important thing on a dragonfly’s back and hope he flew it to the other side. Um, probably not. A dragonfly can’t really support anything that weighs anything. Good job, you can open your eyes now. Now he’s hanging onto his fake story, afraid to let go of it in an attempt to regain himself. He doesn’t see much chance of getting his life back so he’s afraid to give up the little bit that he has left. But he’s still hopeful... he’s hoping that his newfound love for truth will bring back his old self (“hoping it brings you back to me”), while his love for the world (“my love in the wind”) was the wind that drove it away.

The bridge is pretty easy to figure out now. “We are not poets / We have no right to make amendments / This story’s over, this chapter’s closing / I don’t know how it ends / But I really don’t like how it begins” (22-26). We are not the creators of ourselves and our lives, and therefore have to right to change the things (like our personalities) that God has created. I’m not saying we don’t have the right to make choices, because we do have that right. But trying to change ourselves by doing something that we don’t want to do and have no reason for doing, other than to be like someone else, is wrong. God has a plan for everyone... going outside of that would be “making amendments”; it’s not a right we have or need. After he acknowledges his complete stupidity and lack of respect for authority, he says that he’s going to change. This part of his life is over. He doesn’t like what he’s written, and so he’s going to submit to God’s will and let Him decide how it ends.

The line “We’re burning pages” is repeated twice at the very end of the song. “We’re burning pages, we’re burning pages now” (27-28). Once again, pages are being burned. We’re burning the rest of the pages we’ve written in exchange for true life.

So here you go... “Fiction” by Kids in the Way explained in plain, not-very-pretty English: “I started wanting to be someone else and imaging what it would be like, and then I turned myself into that person. That person is fake and I can never make myself happy trying to be that person. This isn’t who I am, and most of the world seems to be doing the same thing. God made you the way He knows you need to be, and you should just be that person. Don’t be a faker.” 

[NOTE: My explanation of this song turned out to be quite different from Dave Pelsue’s. I’m pretty sure I remember him saying this song was actually about musicians writing things as if they were about their own lives, when really they’re not, or something along the lines of that. But hey look, I made it apply to average people. Go me.] 

Listen to “Fiction”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2hQZdpSwko