Six songs aimed at someone other than who you assumed.
You decide who a song is about on the way in, usually from the title and the first chorus, and most of the time you never revisit it. The decoy does its job. The obvious subject sits in plain view while the real one stands just out of frame, and the song lets you keep the easy read for as long as you want it.
These six were aimed somewhere else the whole time. The most-played love song on the radio is a study in surveillance and control. A ballad that sounds sung to a lover is a man arguing with himself. An anthem of wounded self-pity is spoken in the voice of a villain who was never the writer. A moody-sounding rock song is a man at a graveside. A first-person threat is the drug talking, not a warning against it. And the language of worship is pointed at a body and an institution, not at heaven. Six decoys, six real targets.
Surface any of these and the obvious subject drops away. You stop hearing the song you brought in with you and start hearing the one that was playing all along.
6 pearls in this string
“The most-played love song on the radio, ever.”
Sting wrote it as the opposite. "I think it's a nasty little song, really rather sinister," he has said; he was thinking of "Big Brother, surveillance and control." Every line you've heard at weddings, watching, owning, the open vow that he'll be watching you, is jealousy and possession, not devotion. The tenderness is the disguise. Listen again and the soft melody starts to feel like someone who will not let you leave.
“"With or without you" is sung to the woman he loves.”
It is sung to himself. Bono said the song is the fight between the faithful husband he is and the "vagrant and idler" who wants to flee that life entirely. Both men live in him; neither wins. The title is not a man unable to live with a partner, it is a man unable to live with, or without, the restless half of his own nature.
“Townshend wrote this about his own sadness and loneliness.”
He did not. The man saying nobody knows what it is to be him is not Pete Townshend at all; he is a villain, a character written for an unfinished rock opera called Lifehouse. The whole ache that makes people adopt this as their personal anthem belongs to the bad guy of a story that was never finished. The self-pity is in character, not confession.
“A moody anthem about feeling angry and dark inside.”
It is a funeral. The narrator is watching his partner being buried; that famous image of black cars in a row is the procession, and the black he wants smeared over everything is grief, the color draining out of a world that lost its center. Tony Visconti called it "desperation and desolation, no hint of hope." It is not a mood. It is a man at a graveside.
“The song is one long warning about the danger of addiction.”
It is not a warning. The voice in the song is the drug itself, in the first person, taunting the addict it owns. Every taunt, every command, is the substance talking, not Hetfield warning you off it. His own frame: it is the moment when, instead of you controlling what you take, the drug controls you. The threats you have sung along to for years were never advice. They were the captor speaking.
“The gospel words mean he is praising a higher power.”
There is no higher power in it. The worship vocabulary, "Amen", "Good God", "worship", "take me to church", points at the body of one lover, not heaven. By Hozier's own account the song is an indictment of the Catholic Church for teaching shame about sex; the church he sings of being taken to is human love itself, raised up exactly where the Church told him to feel guilt.
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