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Just heard it on CBC Radio 2 for the first time!
9 Hip shows in 6 different venues
2007-01-20 - Winnipeg - MTS Centre
2009-09-10 - Winnipeg - Centennial Concert Hall
2011-07-07 - Winnipeg - Shaw Park
2012-12-01 - Fargo - Fargo Theatre
2013-01-26 - Winnipeg - MTS Centre
2013-01-28 - Brandon - Keystone Centre
2013-09-06 - Moose Jaw - Mosaic Place
2015-02-14 - Winnipeg - MTS Centre
2016-08-05 - Winnipeg - MTS Centre
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Love this song. Very Phantom Powerish. Still my favourite band fronted by my favourite lyricist. I'm so happy to see them continue to make albums together. How many 30 year old bands are there?
To me the song is all about the egotistical nature of mankind, particularly the Western world, and a counter point suggesting that obsessing over this isn't helpful.
"a world possessed by the human mind" - How mankind views himself as the center of the world, and the affect this self-centeredness has had (it's possessed the world, "possessed" as in "dominated", not "owned").
"We're in awe of no one. We've none of their fears. The fighting's going nowhere and we stay right here." - We're spoiled by our own dominance. Other beings don't have it so easy.
"just give me the news. it can all be lies." - more egotistical thinking.
I think the narrator is thinking about all this and the other person is discounting it...they have no interest in discussing this. They're more in the moment and happy to be blissfully unaware. "Then I think you said, It's fine".
I like how Gord plays with phrasing. "Then I hope I smiled" instead of "I smiled"...kind of a "meta" way of thinking about a memory instead of just recanting it. He has always done this, been creative with phrasing.
Can't wait for the album!
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In the video, the letter the guy reads seems like a break up letter. Some of the passages I can make out are "You begged me not to leave you", "We are both broken", "I am so sorry, I don't want us to be like that", "breaking my heart".
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I recall someone mentioning it has an Escape is at Hand vibe to it. While I agree, I also hear a bit of Something On. I'm really digging this song.
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Finally heard it on local radio (Live 88.5 Ottawa) for the first time today (after many YouTube listens and much humming).
I've been a huge fan since 1990 or so, and this song seems like perfect, beautiful Hip to me. Definitely not going to be a chart topper but who cares?
Multi-faceted lyrics, interesting video, subtle Canadiana moments (a rustle in the bush, a walk down a frosty country lane, the extra layer of thought, expressed in a song). Nothing else even comes close to being "my music".
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I missed that post first time around. :thumb:
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It was a good choice for first single. A bright, mid-tempo song with dramatic lyrics, quite distinct from any past Hip singles but not so far from their more familiar sound as to alienate casual listeners. It's perfectly sequenced on the album, given the need for something brighter and toe-tapping after that too-long coda to 'Man.' And for me, it's served as a sort of 'anchor' song on that record, a reliable track that I know I'll enjoy regardless of how I'm feeling about the production of the other songs on any given day.
They should have followed it up with the album's most killer track, 'Machine,' but that's another story.
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in line with what KWT said above me, it is perfectly sequenced on the record.
to the point that I didn't care much for it when it was first released and I heard it in isolation. It was only when I heard it following Man that it really resonated with me.
I love it now.
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In a world possessed by the human mind
The ordinary method [of education] is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.
A man’s knowledge may be said to be mature, in other words, when it has reached the most complete state of perfection to which he, as an individual, is capable of bringing it, when an exact correspondence is established between the whole of his abstract ideas and the things he has actually perceived for himself. His will mean that each of his abstract ideas rests, directly or indirectly, upon a basis of observation, which alone endows it with any real value; and also that he is able to place every observation he makes under the right abstract idea which belongs to it.
A world possessed by the human mind
has really grown on me. I think it is going to be a fun song live.
