Decoding the Lyrics

The lyrics of Otherside are:

Even your going Let it find you Even in hiding Find it knows you

Rocking you to sleep From the Otherside

Tethered by timing Let it undo Aimless and ripped From the root Finds you

Rocking you to sleep From the Otherside

A marked advantage of using “Otherside” over “Retrograde” is that its lyrics are a lot more equivocal, so there is more room for personal interpretation. While “Retrograde” dealt fairly explicitly with themes of loneliness, “Otherside” can be taken to mean anything. That being said, there is a hint of a general theme of giving in and surrender.

After some deliberation, the team is still pretty intent on the loneliness theme, but we want to expand into a broader theme of social anxiety. We’ve found this theme quite creatively stimulating, even if we were not able to execute our original idea. Also, the theme of social anxiety can tie into the idea of surrendering in many ways. Specifically, we want to focus on the liabilities and imagined inevitabilities of social anxiety.

Abdullah likes to describe social anxiety as a cognitive dissonance between one’s own faulty social instincts, and one’s recognition of their own social instincts as faulty. We’re interested in exploring the surrendering of social inhibition, and what happens when those faulty social instincts are allowed to apply. This can manifest in myriad ways; one may become needy or despondent or just insufferable, and fragile relationships may break. It’s a nihilistic idea, but we’re almost talking about a sort of social carnage: what happens when you stop stopping yourself from letting your flawed instincts guide social interaction?

It’s a rich idea, and we don’t intend to be didactic. This is a very general concept, and hopefully we can streamline it and present it in digestible form.