S1|E5: What Was I Supposed to Learn?

As we approach the end of what we’ve been assuming is the linear narrative of the album, we begin to see the Narrator wrestling with the question of doing what he knows is right—or at least what he perceives to be right.

One of the fascinating and important aspects of mewithoutYou’s entire body of work is the raw emotional and existential honesty of lyrics. Though we’ve been reading the record with Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in the background, we should not assume the Narrator is going to turn decisively to the ethical life (posited by the character “B” in Kierkegaard’s text.) Instead, we see the honesty of the failure to come away with “what I was supposed to learn” as the Narrator tells us. This failure has been present throughout the first two tracks, but now it seems the Narrator is able to see it, which is perhaps the first step in getting some actual perspective on the nature of his emotional pain.

Show Notes

Franz Schubert

The Doors, “Light My Fire”