Time Spent In Los Angeles

Outside the LA area, people assume that Los Angeles is all Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, which is like assuming New York City is all Upper East Side and Park Slope, with no Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. They don't think of the smog and the traffic and the crime and the greed and superficiality of LA, so knowing that "outsiders" view LA as some kind of dream place is disenchanting for anyone who's spent time there - you know that everyone's idea of Utopia is entirely misleading, and so you know better than to think Utopia exists. I think when Taylor Goldsmith sings about "that special kind of sadness, that tragic set of charms", he's referring to that disillusionment.

In the lyrics, he says that when he tells people he's from Los Angeles ("to see what that says about a man"), it misleads people - he grew up in North Hills, which is definitely not the Beverly Hills image some people would get in their heads. North Hills is in the San Fernando Valley nestled between a bunch of freeways, which is what I think of when he says "it's something written in the headlights". I think it embitters people from LA when others assume they've grown up with everything handed to them. I think when he says, "I used to think someone would love me for the places I have been," he's saying that he used to hope someone would fall in love with him in spite of him being from LA, and that he'd be appreciated as someone who works hard ("and the dirt that I've been gathering deep beneath my nails"), not as someone who's had everything handed to him.

When he meets this girl, he sees in her what he loves about home, not of the outsider's idea of Los Angeles, and it drives him to go back and recreate Los Angeles for himself ("and I'm going home to make it mine") instead of subscribing to the outsiders' misconception.