Obsession, Stone Sour Style

Okay, so, I have a new favorite song. It's called "Through Glass" by the band Stone Sour and I'm absolutely obsessed with it. I heard it on Sirius in the car one day, not really paying attention to what was playing until my little ears picked up a a particular pair of lyrics:

" no one ever tells you that forever feels like home / sitting all alone inside your head. "

It just clicked -- how the hell do they know exactly how life feels like for me? I pretty much fell in love right then and there. I don't actually know what the entire song is about for sure, and in all honestly, I really could care less.

I think it might've been Jim Adkins, lead vocals and songwriter of Jimmy Eat World, who refused to answer questions asking what he meant by a particular lyric or song. He said it doesn't matter what you "mean" when you write something, because that would be ignoring the more important part -- what the fans (ie: readers, listeners) get from it. If he writes a song about an elephant and someone interprets it as a touching tribute to a lost pet, if he sings about a time he was angry and someone sees it as an anthem for freedom, he'll embrace that latter interpretation because it's something created directly from or immediately accessed by his music.

Not put myself on par with an internationally successful rock band, but I can truly commiserate. Despite the very personal nature characteristic of most of my poetry and prose, once it's on paper, it's its own entity. There's no need to consistently tie it back to me. That is not to say I don't revise poems in attempts to accurately portray what my initial intention was, but when I hear that people have interpreted it an entirely different manner -- there's no way in Hell I'm going to tell anyone what I was thinking when I wrote it. I'm fascinated with the way people process rhetoric, and to be able to not only be witness to the details that led them to a particular concept but to be the one who those very words originated from gives me a fantastic feeling of being, right there and then, exactly where I'm supposed to be in the universe.