I should leave it alone but you’re not right
I should leave it alone but you’re not right
I should live in salt for leaving you behind
Tell us a little bit about the lyrics to “I Should Live in Salt.”
I write all the lyrics, and this one was sort of inspired — very much inspired — by my younger brother, Tom, who’s nine years younger than I am. And he was on my mind a lot while we were making this record because he was living with my wife and I at the time. Still — actually still does. So he was on my mind and in my house. But he came on tour with us when we were touring for High Violet and made a film [Mistaken for Strangers] about his experience there, which is, which was — it’s a complicated movie. We’re very different brothers. Whereas I might be kind of buttoned-up and ambitious, he’s more lax in his approach to the universe, I guess. We love each other a great deal, but there’s often a lot of conflict between the two of us.
And there’s some fun imagery in one of the verses: “Can you turn the TV down? You should know me better than that.”
The lyrics to that are like a bunch of little fragments of thoughts about him. And, truthfully, it’s about us actually getting to know each other as adults, because I went off to college when he was a little kid. He was 9 when I was 18 and went off to college, and then I moved to New York after that. And he kind of went his own — a different path.
I felt a lot of guilt, because I think [he] needed an older brother the most when you start hitting your teens, and that’s when I sort of took off and disappeared on him a little bit. I mean, we’ve been close our whole lives. But then, when he came and joined us on the tour as a roadie, it was the first time we were spending a lot of time together as adults. And it was a big shift in our relationship and trying to figure out how to love each other and respect each other as adults — not just this much older-younger brother sibling dynamic. So the song kind of is a reflection on all of that.
And you said you felt a little guilt, but the chorus is, “I should live in salt for leaving you behind.”
Honestly, that was just kind of an abstract image or something in my head and I don’t know. I think Lot’s wife turned to salt when she looked back at the city. I think they used to pack bodies in salt. So there’s not specifically any meaning into it directly, but it seemed like a bad thing to have to live in salt. A lot of my lyrics are approximate meaning without me knowing why they sound right.
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(Source: Spotify)
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