Truly a beautiful song. It's clearly a relationship song--the entire album is an exploration of an individual's experiences reliving a bittersweet relationship, and this one starts it out...
The lyrics are sad and nostalgic, and they position a romantic relationship by using politicized language. Relationships are about losing and regaining personal sovereignty, and creating--upon a given landscape--a kind of psychic map...think of it as geographic waypoints significant to a couple's existence. The "Fake Empire" is the relationship as projected out into a city...it creates a significant landscape that is meaningful to the singer, but is ultimately just a construct, not real in any formal sense. It's the territory of the couple's own making...both real and imaginary.
The song is a little bit ironic, even sarcastic, with its opening images of domestic bliss and disney-esque happiness. The singer is revisiting this earlier idealism from a point of confusion and inquiry...but ultimately he can't sort things out & there's a detente...the only thing possible is an agreement to not over-analyze the situation, to let it be, to wait.
Truly a beautiful song. It's clearly a relationship song--the entire album is an exploration of an individual's experiences reliving a bittersweet relationship, and this one starts it out...
The lyrics are sad and nostalgic, and they position a romantic relationship by using politicized language. Relationships are about losing and regaining personal sovereignty, and creating--upon a given landscape--a kind of psychic map...think of it as geographic waypoints significant to a couple's existence. The "Fake Empire" is the relationship as projected out into a city...it creates a significant landscape that is meaningful to the singer, but is ultimately just a construct, not real in any formal sense. It's the territory of the couple's own making...both real and imaginary.
The song is a little bit ironic, even sarcastic, with its opening images of domestic bliss and disney-esque happiness. The singer is revisiting this earlier idealism from a point of confusion and inquiry...but ultimately he can't sort things out & there's a detente...the only thing possible is an agreement to not over-analyze the situation, to let it be, to wait.