they rule! i love this song. its great. i am making the first comment! so happy! i've made more for them. go check. all their songs are awesome

this song is amazing...one of their best!

great song. one of my favorites by them.

so catchy and addicting i luv this song

I get the feeling from the first verse that he tried proposing to his girlfriend and it went really wrong afterward. Anyways, good song.

I don't understand the line "you spat the sweat from the brow." What does everyone think that means? It's also ironic that this song is about fake frowns, most people think of smiles as being fake.

"you spat the sweat from the brow"

just another way to say you sweated. probably a lot of sweating.

like, your pores spitting out sweat. or something.

he proposed and she said no so now he is driving back home and is pissed off and thinks the whole relationship was crap, i think?

yeah i think that this song follows off of amputations like same girl, same guy she wants to get back with, same narrator, but now its all falling apart since he proposed, which he thought in a desparate moment woudl get this girl back, but it didnt work, she sort of fled physically or emotionally, and now hes driving back home...i dunno i could be totally off, that's sort of a simple explanation...doesn't explain the jailhouse queen and jury and judge screaming to hang lines, maybe she killed someone? who knows, the lyrics are great, so dense and mysterious that you want to figure them out and then you sort of dont because you know that the explanation is oging to rob them of some of their magic. so i'll stop there.

p.s. eifel, this is one of my favorite songs!

Bent at the knee=begging. I don't think he was proposing. I think a girl was convicted of a crime and kind of begging them not to take her away. Maybe they wanted to give her the death penalty?( jury and judge were screaming to hang) And "increasing pixels and sound"... Maybe he was watching her on TV? WHO REALLY KNOWS :)

"you'd be the jailhouse queen
jury and judge were screaming to hang"
I think it means that she won't change her mind, and she wants the relationship to end.

not every song has to be about love, i mean c'mon people, open your minds.

Sureee a lot of songs are about it, but some aren't, like WHy You'd Want to Live Here, and such.

I'm thinking it's just abuot a guy wrongly accused of a crime, by some unfair system of judgement. Like Witch trial type, notice he uses "Magistrate" which no longer exist, but were used during Witch Trials.

you figure out.

This is how I see it: the singer is on trial for a DWI which must've ended in either a death or serious property damage.

At the song's beginning, he's begging for clemency... "bent at the knees," although probably not literally. His pleas only agitate the court, worsening his situation.

He thinks to himself that, once he's convicted (once he's "on the bus") he'll surely be turned out, as it were. That is, he'll be sodomized by the inmates.

There is a seeming implication that he not only thought about this, but also mentioned it while begging. It's not just possible but fairly likely a remark like that would incense the judge and/or jurors.
Sometimes people don't like to be reminded of what they're REALLY doing to another human being. It's easy to be morally superior to a criminal when you've never stood before the bench.

Even second degree murder doesn't earn capital punishment, so the "judge and jury" are not actually "screaming to hang." We can assume he means that his case is obviously not a favorable one.

Despairing and exhausted, he slaps his forehead, knocking away beads of sweat gathered there. His defense has collapsed; his attorney "shrugs his shoulders," for Christ's sake.

As the trial winds it's way to the finish, the walls are definitely closing in on him. The court focuses in on every last detail of the prosecutor's statement; the state does a good job apparently, trying to make "each, one count" of the inditement.

The judge is "keyed in" at this point, preparing to pronounce guilt (A magistrate is quite nearly the same thing as a judge. The use of the term could easily be a reference to the Salem witch trials mentioned by iknowmyonion).

There are at least ten counts. All of them are bound to stick, and he knows it. He knows on account of all those stern, disapproving expressions in the jury box.
They're all good, god-fearing people, right? That's the impression they give, frowning like that. But it's not who they really are, and he knows it as well as they do.

However, he's not just talking about the jury. He's talking about everybody... acquaintances, friends, family. Everybody is sententious toward him and his drinking problem. Everbody is wearing a "fake frown," pretending they never drove drunk... they never committed a crime... they never wound up in court... they never did anything wrong.

There are so many frowning, lying expressions in his life, he can't keep count. He "can't drive straight." That's why he never got over his drinking problem. That's why he's been charged. That's why they're about to put him in prison.

It like a scene straight out of Camus' "The Stranger," or "A Happy Death." The defendant is dehumanized in the presence of his peers, transmogrified into an image of callousness and cruelty.

By the story's end, the jury has no "interest" in the either the person himself or the criminal act, but only the idea and attached evil of the crime, the implied guilt.
As modern day defendants are amplified in appearance, blown up to inhuman size and sound on our television sets, we cease to care about their innocence or guilt, human rights, and bodily safety and proceed to concern ourselves with their severe punishment.

That all sounds right on target lnd3005

i don't know how they manage to write such brilliant songs. this song is so awesome.

I've been wondering, why "Fake" frowns?
How are they not real frowns?
WHY are they not real frowns?
Amazing song though.