With my debut EP coming out yesterday, I thought that anyone who’s enjoying it might appreciate learning a little bit more about those 5 songs and what they mean. So, here’s a track-by-track breakdown of ‘Coming Alive or Falling Asleep’.
(If you haven’t heard the EP, you can listen to it below. Like what you hear? Buy it here.)
*Warning, this piece includes explicit discussion of mental health issues, if this is likely to trigger you, do not continue*
‘Coming Alive’
Track one was the first song to be released from this EP – and for a very good reason. ‘Coming Alive’ introduces the core theme of CAFA, which is the sense of contradiction I often feel within myself, which manifests in my actions and emotions. My mind is constantly jumping from one state to another several times every few minutes, the most common mindsets being either a powerful feeling of determined optimism or a crushing sense of hopelessness that makes want to just crawl into bed and stay there (hence, ‘I’m either coming alive, or I’m falling asleep’). This same clash of optimism and pessimism is also seen in the song’s bridge, where I sing ‘everybody says I should fall into line, but I’d rather walk on mine’. Here, however, I’m contradicting the negative thoughts of others.
This exploration of contradiction gets more specific in the verses. In fact, verses one and two are directly at odds with each other. In the first verse I talk about an impulsive need to take what I want and need from the world around me, and in verse two I proclaim myself to be a mess of hypocrisy and conflicting emotion.
It’s also interesting to note that in verse two I sing ‘I’m made of my contradictions, and I steal all my lines from fiction’, which is a reference to the following line from Mark Lawrence’s 2012 novel King of Thorns:
“We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next.”
– Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
That quote has always resonated with me (and I would highly recommend Lawrence’s work), and I enjoyed injecting some tongue-in-cheek humour into the lyrics by confessing that I do, in fact, steal my lines from fiction.
‘Ruin Your Life for Fun’
Track number two, probably the most straight-forward of the five songs and definitely the most upbeat, is a celebration of the desire to be free in a world that wants to keep you in a box. The theme definitely matches the form with this one, and that form is a bare-faced tribute to the classic pop-punk bands I grew up with, artists like Jimmy Eat World, Alkaline Trio and All American Rejects.
The most interesting part of this song, to me, is the bridge where the acoustic guitars from the intro come back in for a chord progression that actually changes the song’s key back and forth between D major and G major. Over this acoustic refrain I sing about how I’ll be taking whatever chances come my from now on and leaving pain behind me. These words don’t always ring true, but they do sometimes, and that’s enough.
I also really love the riff for this song, it’s played in the same position as a few of the motifs from Fall Out Boy’s earlier albums, ‘Sugar, We’re Going Down’ is a good example.
‘El’
If I had to pick one song from CAFA that means the most to me, it would definitely be this one. ‘El’ is, effectively, a message to a person with whom I used to be deeply in love, wherein I wish that person a full and happy life. A lot of songs that come from heartbreak are very bitter and vengeful, and there were definitely times when I felt like expressing myself that way, but it would have been dishonest. Honesty, I find, is the most important virtue one can possess when creating art, and if I’m being honest, this breakup just left me feeling inadequate and lonely. Dating someone with rather severe mental health issues is not easy, and I can’t blame someone for doing what they need to to have the life they want.
However, I have made some progress as far as my feelings towards this person are concerned, and I no longer feel that I’m to blame for losing someone I still care about. Love is complicated, and whenever I find myself wondering why getting hurt is so easy, I remember this quote:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Also, I think this song has the best composition on the EP, and I think that it shows how much I’ve improved as a recording artist and producer over the past year or so.
‘Cold Out, Colder In’
The penultimate song on this EP is the ‘biggest’, and modesty aside it’s also pretty damn sexy. A bluesy riff, funky drums, and some of the slickest lyrics I’ve ever written? That’s the stuff that late night, cigarette-hanging-out-a-car-window songs are made of.
Okay, I’ll stop patting myself on the back now.
In all seriousness, this song’s lyrics are quite dark. They express my feelings of being made numb by life and the sadness I deal with. This actually revisits the T.S Eliot quote I mentioned earlier, particularly where he advises that leaving one’s heart shut off from love will make it cold and unsalvageable.
It’s actually a common misconception that depression is a state of constant sorrow. Sure, that’s often how it manifests, but the real danger comes when it makes you lethargic, strips away your will to keep moving. That’s what this song is about.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, as this songs chorus ends with a hopeful message, a certainty that life will one day be what I want it to be, and all I have to do is weather the storm that it is right now.
I hope the guitar solo in this track drives home the message that I’m not shutting myself of from my emotions, rather keeping them held down until I’m in a better place to deal with them, because what’s a bigger explosion of feeling than ripping a straight-forward, hard-rocking guitar solo after shouting “it’s just one more year in hell!’?
‘Falling Asleep’
Alright, let’s get SAD.
‘Falling Asleep’ brings full circle all of the themes explored in this EP, and it provides the other half of the central metaphor in CAFA. The lyrics to the EP’s closing track re-visit a lot of previous ideas, including:
- fiction and literature and the role they play in my creativity – “So used to hiding out in the fiction, inspired by dreams, awoken by diction”;
- the desire to be free – “I hope when I run out of time he’ll run away and he’ll survive”;
- wanting to close myself off from feeling – “I point my face at the cold, I let it touch my soul, and I close my eyes”;
- accepting that I need to wait for things to get better – “No one’s gonna come for me, one day I’ll come alive but for now I’m falling asleep”;
just to name a few. There’s not much else I can say about this song as it’s all really right there in the lyrics, and it’s mostly a summary of the EP as a whole.
One thing I hope people have picked up on is that because this song is perhaps the most open and vulnerable I get on the EP, I decided to make it the most mainstream-sounding too. I wanted this to represent the shifting attitudes we’re seeing nowadays towards mental health and when and how it can be discussed. I hope people continue to talk about these issues whenever they feel they can, either through talking, making music or any other kind of art.
I know I will.
Benji Holmes 