Give me your hands
Show me the door
I cannot stand
To wait anymore
Somebody said
Be what you be
We can be old and cold and dead on the scene
But I love you more than words can say
I can't count the reasons I should stay

Give me some more
Time in a dream
Give me the hope
To run out of steam
Somebody said
It could be here
We could be roped up, tied up
Dead in a year
I can't count the reasons I should stay
One by one they all just fade away

I'm tired of the wait and see's
I'm tired of that part of me
That makes up a perfect lie
To keep us busy
But hours turn into days
So watch what you throw away
And be here to recognize
There's another way

Give me some more
Time in a dream
Give me the hope
To run out of steam
Somebody said
It could be here
We could be roped up, tied up
Dead in a year
Oh I love you more than words can say
I can't count the reasons I should stay
One by one they all just fade away
Oh I love you more than words can say


Lyrics submitted by AutumnLeaves34

At Least It Was Here song meanings
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9 Comments

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  • +9
    General Comment

    Community Rocks!

    NimbleWalruson January 05, 2011   Link
  • +9
    General Comment

    six seasons and a movie!

    RIPsteggyon January 30, 2012   Link
  • +2
    My Interpretation

    Great song, a theme song to an absolutetly excellent show.

    People have interpreted this song as either talking about a relationship, or contemplating suicide. It seems to me as both.He seems to say to this girl that she is the reason that he doesn't try to kill himself, and that he still has hope for the future because of her.

    guywithbookson May 19, 2014   Link
  • +1
    My Interpretation

    It seems to me it's more about the inevitability of life. The singer doesn't understand what's keeping him here since he realized there is no point to life. But then at the bridge, he says that maybe there is more to life than the end. That it's the moments in between that make it.

    Kinda makes sense from Jeff's perspective of life. He only wanted to earn his degree back, but at the end he realized he actually made friends and family out of it.

    elysia05on March 12, 2016   Link
  • +1
    Song Meaning

    The song is about trying to make the wrong relationship work.

    "Tie me to a dream" refers to him tying himself to the dream of what the relationship could be. They will end up stuck and "dead in the water" because they force themselves to stay together.

    Het still loves the other person, but is tired of the faults in their relationship, as stated in the "But I love you more then words can say.. I can't count the reasons I should stay."

    He is saying that they should both move on instead of waisting their time lying to themselves and eachother that they can make it work.

    The song works perfectly for comunity. A running theme in the show is that all the members of the study group are toxic for eachother, but nevrtheless they stay together.

    I could go on explaining every line, but you get the point.

    FrankMensingon November 02, 2021   Link
  • 0
    My Interpretation

    This is a tough one. I read it as a song about unrequited love.

    The speaker is hopelessly in love with their partner, but their partner doesn't reciprocate at the same level and is unwilling to commit to a long term relationship.

    The speaker vascillates between wanting to end it cold turkey to stop their painful longing vs wanting to cling to and draw our the imperfect and fated relationship he (or she) has for as long as possible. Unable to decide between the unworkable status quo and fear of losing his partner, the speaker is begging the partner to make the decision (with a glimmer of hope the partner will realize they belong together).

    Stanza 1: just end it ("Show me the door/I cannot stand/To wait anymore")

    S2: let me live in the fantasy that we could be together ("Give me some more/Time in a dream")

    S3: I can't keep pouring my life into a doomed relationship. But, you know, we could be together... ("I'm tired of the wait and see's/...But hours turn into days/...And be here to recognize/There's another way")

    S4: I recognize this relationship is harmful but i love you more than the pain; let me have the fantasy of us together for as long as i can. ("I can't count the reasons I should stay/...Oh I love you more than words can say")

    The death motifs somewhat clash with my interpretation. I think, at a general level, they reflect how depressed the speaker is about where things are at. More specifically, the two lines offer different visions of the future.

    One, how they could grow old together if the partner committed ("We can be old and cold and dead on the sea")

    The other, when the speaker tries to convince himself the status quo works, argues that life is fleeting and one should live for the moment not the long-term ("We could be roped up, tied up/Dead in a year")

    Some lines could be read to have hints of violence or suicide (death lines + "But hours turn into days/So watch what you throw away"), but I see the main themes being the desperate push and pull emotions of love and sadness in a one-sided relationship.

    6Seasons&1Movieon May 16, 2020   Link
  • 0
    My Interpretation

    If you think about it the person in the song resprents jeff

    I can't count the reasons I should stay One by one they all just fade away

    Jeff sees no reason to stay at greendale with everyone he cared for leaving

    Utakataon May 18, 2023   Link
  • 0
    General Comment

    The band's website gives the last word of line 7 as "sea," not "scene." Subsequent lines are: "Tie me to dream," not "Time in a dream." and "Iʼm tied to the wait and sees," not "Iʼm tired of the wait and sees."

    This song is a tough one to crack. It is clearly about someone considering a decision. It is repeatedly unclear which lines are metaphors and which are concrete. It is repeatedly unclear when a pair of consecutive lines refer to the same idea, expressed twice, or when the second line refers to a contrasting idea. It is several times unclear when a quotation ends.

    But it is clear that it is about reaching a decision between two possible choices for what the singer will do next in his life. One involves staying in his present circumstance and the other involves moving to another one. One involves a love of the unnamed second person; by implication, the other means rejecting that love. So the question is, is the song about (1) staying with a love affair (or platonic love) vs. leaving to explore other options, or is the song about (2) staying in some solitary situation in life vs. leaving it to explore love? I think the evidence, such as it is, points towards (1), but the aforementioned ambiguity makes it hard to be certain. The title may be the best evidence we have: “At Least It Was Here” – itself quite the vague phrase! – seems to say, after a phase in someone’s life has ended, that though it did end (past tense “was”) there was a bright side (“at least”) to it having happened. That would make more sense if the love was the thing in the past, and the title is saying, well, at least it is good that there was a love, before it ended. So my reading is that this is about a man who has decided to leave a relationship and is going on to try new things in life.

    All of that said, I find myself toying with a very specific interpretation that makes sense of some of the very unusual references to rope (four!) and the sea, and as far as I can tell, this reading is original to me: Is this song about The Odyssey?!?

    In Homer’s Odyssey, a man spends ten years returning home after the Trojan War, The trip is made primarily by sea. He is delayed by many obstacles put in his way by Poseidon, including three times when female figures seduce him, to try to: He spends one year on land as the lover of Circe; he sails by the Sirens, whose songs would draw his ship to doom if he could not resist; he then spends seven years on land as the lover of Calypso before choosing to leave and return home to his wife, Penelope. The Odyssey has far more situations in it than this song could possibly contain, but it may refer to two or three of them:

    1) Give me your hands Show me the door I cannot stand To wait anymore

    With Circe for a year, Odysseus tires of waiting and decides to leave. (Alternately, this could refer to his time with Calypso, but there are more lines indicative of Circe.)

    2) Somebody said Be what you'll be

    Hermes delivers a message to Odysseus, telling him how to avoid being turned into an animal by Circe. “Be what you’ll be.” Hermes would be the “someone.”

    3) We could be old and cold and dead on the sea

    If Odysseus and his men stay, they could grow old until they die in the seaside of Aeaea, Circe’s home.

    4) But I love you more than words can say

    Odysseus’s love for Penelope compels him to move on and leave.

    5) I can’t count the reasons I should stay

    There are no reasons to stay with Circe, so he leaves.

    The next lines seem to describe Odysseus’s predicament with the Sirens, and how he resolves it, by having his men physically tie him to a mast on the ship so that he is unable to steer the ship towards them.

    6) Give me some rope Tie me to dream

    Odysseus orders his men to tie him to the mast so that, while he hears the dream song of the Sirens, he cannot be driven to act on it.

    7) Give me the hope to run out of steam

    By being tied to the mast, the energy he would use to make the wrong decision is spent uselessly and harmlessly in a struggle against the ropes; his will to do the wrong thing runs out of steam.

    8) Somebody said it can be here

    Hermes visits Odysseus twice in the Odyssey; the second time, it is to recommend that Odysseus leave Calypso to return home by sea. “Somebody said,” both times, may refer to Hermes delivering messages.

    9) We could be roped up, tied up, dead in a year

    To be honest, this one line is where the Odyssey interpretation may fall apart; it may refer to the year he spends with Circe, but the “rope” reference which is literal with the Sirens would be metaphorical here, and this seems to be out of sequence with all of the other passages, which otherwise match the Odyssey quite nicely.

    10) I can't count the reasons I should stay One by one they all just fade away

    Just as before with Circe, he finds that he has no real reason to stay with Calypso.

    11)

    Iʼm tied to the wait and sees Iʼm tired of that part of me That makes up a perfect lie To keep us between But hours turn into days So watch what you throw away And be here to recognize Thereʼs another way

    “Tied” appears again as the fifth reference to rope. This may summarize Odysseus’s time spent with Calypso, where waiting and seeing binds him to a “lie” – this is not where he belongs, and though a great deal of time passes (seven years), he eventually recognizes that there is another way, and escapes by sea to end up back home.

    It would be somewhat appropriate if the title song for a TV series about college had such a literary inspiration. The extremely specific references to rope, the sea, and leaving behind love seem to work very well at times, but I’ll admit that I suspect that this is probably just clever pattern-matching and that the band, if they read this, would have a laugh or an eye-roll. If they intended no specific reference to the Odyssey, however, I think that nonetheless, the song captures the same general circumstance of Odysseus: A man is in a long-lasting love that is keeping him from moving on in life, but in time, after someone’s words prompt him to do so, he decides to move on.

    rikdad101@yahoo.comon January 22, 2021   Link
  • -1
    My Interpretation

    Many people thinking it's about suicide or something negative made my heart hurt. I must confess when I listened for the first time to the words rope, dream, stay, tie, dead... my mind went there too (suicide). Hopefully someone else feels the same way. From a man to his lover:

    Take my hands... ...and guide me I really can't... ...make this(1) by myself They(2)... ...don't approve of our love They(2) are expecting the worst outcome

    But I'll do it, cause I love you so much I decide(1) to stay with you

    But still, give me the tools so I can dream(3) big of us Hope of a future(3) [together] They(2)... ...even say we are ruining our lives right now They(2) are expecting the worst outcome

    I decide(1) to stay with you And all the people(2) that don't believe in us don't matter, they disapear

    I'm tired of being submissive to their(2) opinion I'm tired of how I used to Pretend it didn't face me just to not create conflict But I can't live the rest of my life like that They(2) don't realize our love is worth it So I'm thriving to make a decision, head strong Their(2) opinions are not the only way

    Give me some more Time in a dream Give me the hope to run out of steam Somebody said it can be here We could be roped up, tied up, dead in a year

    But I love you more than words can say I can't count the reasons I should stay One by one they all just fade away Oh I love you more than words can say

    But still, give me the tools so I can dream(3) big of us Hope of a future(3) [together] They(2)... ...even say we are ruining our lives right now They(2) are expecting the worst outcome

    I'll do it, cause I love you so much I decide(1) to stay with you And all the people(2) that don't believe in us don't matter, they disappear I decide(1) to stay with you

    diego10208on January 29, 2016   Link

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