Fall Out Boy: Hum Hallelujah (2007)

My favorite, favorite Fall Out Boy lyrics. Let's dig right in.



Hum Hallelujah

It's all a game of this or that
Now versus then
"Better off" against "worse for wear"

And you're someone who knows someone
Who knows someone I once knew
And I just want to be a part of this

The road outside my house is paved with good intentions
Hired a construction crew 'cause it's hell on the engine
And you are the dreamer, and we are the dream
I could write it better than you ever felt it

So hum hallelujah
Just off the key of reason
I thought I loved you;
It was just how you looked in the light

A teenage vow in a parking lot:
"Til tonight do us part"
I'll sing the blues and swallow them too

My words are my faith, to hell with a good name
A remix of your guts, your insides x-rayed
And one day we'll get nostalgic for disaster
We're a bull, your ears are just a china shop

I love you in the same way there's a chapel in a hospital:
One foot in your bedroom and one foot out the door
Sometimes we take chances, sometimes we take pills
I could write it better than you ever felt it

So hum hallelujah
Just off the key of reason
I thought I loved you;
It was just how you looked in the light

A teenage vow in a parking lot:
"Til tonight do us part"
I'll sing the blues and swallow them too

-----------------

Okay! There is so much great stuff here that I'm not even sure where to start. First, some background. In 2008, Fall Out Boy lyricist and bassist Pete Wentz admitted that he once tried to kill himself:

"I got in my car. I remember I was listening to Jeff Buckley doing Leonard Cohen's ‘Hallelujah’ and sat there and took a bunch of Ativan in a Best Buy parking lot."

Perhaps not the ideal way to go out (the Best Buy is what kills it for me), but he lived to write another day and eventually turned his experiences into the words for two songs: From Under the Cork Tree's "7 Minutes in Heaven (Atavan Halen)" and this one.

So let's start at the beginning. With Wentz's suicide attempt as the core of the song (after all, it's called "Hum Hallelujah" and features a choir that sings "Hallelujah" in the exact same way as in the Leonard Cohen song), we can analyze the rest of the words as giving some insight into just why Wentz would want to kill himself.

The first verse features Wentz comparing his life at present to his life in the past, as Patrick Stump sings his lyrics: "It's all a game of...now versus then/'Better off' against 'worse for wear'". It's unclear whether "now" equates to "better off" or "worse for wear", but given the content of the the next verse and the bridge, it's pretty safe to say that Wentz is feeling pretty worse for wear.

The lines "And you're someone who knows someone/Who knows someone I once knew" speak to Wentz's new life in the spotlight, and the idea that when you're famous, everyone with even a tangential relationship to you wants to come along for the ride and reap the benefits of your hard work. The hangers-on that Wentz now has to deal with aren't even his family or friends, but iterations away; people who know people who know him. Because of this, he feels disconnected from his own life and his own success, writing, "I just want to be a part of it."

Immediately after, Wentz writes, "The road outside my house is paved with good intentions," obviously a play on the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So is Wentz's home hell? I have to assume here that he's continuing to discuss what fame has given him, so his house is probably an expensive place, representing his new life as a star. Maybe it's something that he feels he doesn't deserve or reminds him of who he used to be. Nevertheless, all of Wentz's misery stems from "good intentions"; ie- wanting to write and perform music.

"I can write it better than you ever felt it," Stump sings, and while it may be cocky of Wentz to put that out there, it's one of my favorite lines of the song. Often, people can feel their emotions but are incapable of expressing or describing them. Wentz has just the opposite problem: he has no doubt he can put the words on paper but he's having a hard time feeling much of anything.

Still, the music Wentz is helping to create is obviously still something very important to him, and the one thing to which he's holding on. Skipping the chorus for the moment, the next verse of "Hum Hallelujah" reads: "My words are my faith, to hell with a good name". He suggests that not only will he continue to write what he wants, regardless of the consequences, but that even the critics actually want to hear what he's saying, no matter what they say aloud. Inside, Wentz thinks, there's a need for his words, for Fall Out Boy's music, to be out there. "A remix of your guts, your insides x-rayed/And one day we'll get nostalgic for disaster/We're a bull, your ears are just a china shop".

But let's go back and examine the song's chorus. The two parts that make it up have a double meaning, in that they can either be discussing Wentz's troubled relationship to his own life and his own self-image culminating in his suicide attempt, or an actual relationship with another person. His lyrics recall teenage exuberance, making out in parked cars, and unreasonable, fleeting declarations of love. "So hum hallelujah/Just off the key of reason/I thought I loved you;/It was just how you looked in the light." The idea that someone can believe that they're in love with someone else just by way of the light levels is, of course, an exaggeration. But it's not that far from the truth when you're young and "just off the key of reason". Wentz further skewers the idealistic confusion of teenage lust with love when he plays on the famous marriage vow "'til death do us part". "A teenage vow in a parking lot:/'Til tonight do us part,'" he writes. This love isn't everlasting, it's one-night-only.

And then, finally, whether it's that he's over life in general or over the girl or both: "I'll sing the blues and swallow them too", clearly referring to his depressed state and his Ativan overdose.

For the final verse I'm going to focus on the first two lines, which are among my favorite by any band ever, and definitely my top Fall Out Boy lines.

"I love you in the same way there's a chapel in a hospital:/One foot in your bedroom and one foot out the door".

These lines sum up what is absolutely, insanely great about Fall Out Boy. It's not that the words themselves are particularly complex or intriguing. But Wentz brings together a mish-mash of concepts and thoughts and unifies them into a concise, clever statement that somehow actually manages to mean something in the context of the song. So let's break it down. As stated before, already know that there are two parallel threads at work here: a fleeting teenage "love," and Wentz's Ativan overdose.

As far as the former goes, given Wentz's attitude, when the line starts with "I love you in the same way..." even if you don't understand the correlation between chapels and hospitals, you know it can't be a good thing. As it turns out, it's "one foot in your bedroom and one foot out the door". This should be clear enough: he loves the girl enough to sleep with her, but not enough to commit; or, if you prefer, not enough to even spend the night with her afterward. He's only interested in the short-term benefits of the relationship.

As for the "chapel in a hospital" thing, it's something you have to wrap your head around, but I think that what Wentz is trying to get at here is how ridiculous it is to have a chapel, a place where funeral services are held, inside a hospital where people are ostensibly trying to get better. A hospital tries to keep people alive while a chapel ushers them into death, so the people in the hospital are caught in the middle, neither truly living nor truly dead, "one foot in [the] bedroom," their hospital bed, "and one foot out the door," out of life and into death.

Any way you look at it, the result is a sort of stasis between two extremes-- and as Wentz will write three years later in the song "She's My Winona": "Hell or glory/I don't want anything in between". Well, one foot in the bedroom and one out the door is neither hell nor glory, it's exactly what Wentz is looking to avoid. That average, noncommittal middle ground between love and lust, life and death, hell and glory is the worst place of all-- and Wentz needs an escape. Ativan here we come.

The last few paragraphs are quite a bit for a few simple lines, eh? Great, great stuff, and strangely, not as depressing as you'd think-- it's almost uplifting in a way, as the chorus of "hallelujahs" seems to transport Wentz (and by extension, the song) out of the mire and into a more peaceful status quo.

...well, that was a little less focused than I would have liked, but I think I got the basic message across. I suppose it's Third Generation Emo Month here at Slipping Into The Airwaves, because next week we're going to analyze a track from my current obsession, Panic! At the Disco's Vices & Virtues.

Hiatus

Much like a sitcom, Slipping Into the Airwaves is on hiatus this week while I fly to Rhode Island for my cousin's wedding. If I can manage to write up a post I will, but I don't know yet how (or if) that's going to play out.