The Rip Tide

Both lyrically and musically, the best song on the album. I identify with it and maybe interpret it as such, but I get the feeling of revisiting "home" after many years. It's the feeling you get when, after leaving the place where you grew up for several years, you come "home" to find the place only vaguely familiar, and find the loneliness that comes with being somewhere where you only know a few people, as most of your old friends have either drifted away or moved on with their lives. I would get a minor sense of it when I lived overseas and would return over the summer, and then would return again after moving away after college (now there's virtually no connection), but someone recently related it well to me, telling the story of going into a bar in their relatively small hometown and finding that they knew no one there, and that was the sign that this was no longer their "home" but, instead, just a place that they knew, as if it were a place where they had never lived but only knew it from visits. There's a peaceful loneliness at these vaguely nostalgic and vaguely comforting places, and that's what I think this song is talking about. The "house" is a somewhat literal "home" reference, while the "rolling tide" is the general flow of life and moving on.