You Had It Backwards

It has nothing to do with faith. In the American South, "losing my religion" is an everyday idiom for being at the end of your tether: losing your temper, your patience, your civility. Stipe used it that way. The song is not a crisis of belief; it is a song about wanting someone who does not want you back, and Stipe has compared it to The Police's "Every Breath You Take." A pop song about obsession, wearing a title that fooled the world.

It lists them to refuse them. Lorde wrote "Royals" against the luxury name-dropping in the rap and pop she otherwise loved, because none of it matched her ordinary suburban life. Every brand in the chorus is there to be rejected, not flaunted. The mirror image arrived in 2014: a T-Pain remix rewrote the words and turned the song into a celebration of the very luxury it rejects. Play it knowing every label is a target.

It comes out of a war song. The words behind that line echo a chirpy 1939 British music-hall hit, a morale song from the first months of the war. Waters, who lost his father in that war, takes a phrase his parents' generation whistled at catastrophe and hangs it on a verse about the grind of modern life. That brightness is borrowed from people trying not to be afraid, and he uses it to describe a life too busy to notice itself. The cheerfulness is the trap.

Only half of it. The rock-star numbness is real, a 1977 injection before a Philadelphia show, but the second time the numbed voice answers, it is a sick child. Waters told Mojo he remembered having "the flu or something," a temperature of 105 and being delirious. That distant, floating sensation you have been crediting to grown-up burnout was first felt by a frightened boy in a sickbed.

Not quite. The split is built into the song: blues in the verses, where the closed refinery and the lost brother sit, and a proud declaration in the chorus. In his 2016 memoir Springsteen wrote that the clash was too conflicting for some less careful listeners, and that people hear what they want to hear. He also wrote that changing the music would have made the record easier to understand, but less satisfying. The misreading is the price of the song he wanted.

It is a copy too. Cobain said it flatly to Rolling Stone: "I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it." The quiet verse that detonates into the chorus, the sound a thousand bands chased after this song, is borrowed Pixies dynamics, lifted on purpose. The most imitated moment in alternative rock was Cobain imitating someone else first. Play it and listen for the seam.