"a relationship..." "someone..." "a person..."
"I Want to Hold Your Hand is not about Jane... I may have been drawing on my experience with a person I was in love with at the time, and sometimes it was very specific."
"Some songs you can’t really say what they’re about. I know what [I'm Carrying] about. Some people I’ve played it to know what they think it’s about. It could be lots of things. It could be about a girl carrying a baby, or it could be about someone carrying something much more romantic than just packages. You almost can’t talk about it."
"When you’re trying to to reach out to someone, and it’s rejected, that’s a hurtful thing. That happened to me at a particular point. It wasn’t Heather. [Riding to Vanity Fair] was about some other relationship that I had, and this was my therapeutic way of releasing myself."
"Let Me Roll It is a love song at its heart [...] Anyone can understand how exposed you feel when you offer your heart to, or reveal your affections for, another person.The hesitation we feel in that situation, of wanting to reach out but being reluctant to be completely open, is made physical in the abrupt starting and stopping of the riff. A year or two back, I saw a musical called Be More Chill by Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz, about a nerdy boy who can’t say he loves someone."
"Just because I was involved with Jane at the time doesn't mean [I Will] is addressed to, or about, Jane [...] It's a declaration of love, yes, but not always to someone specific. Unless it's to a person out there who's listening to the song. And they have to be ready for it. It's almost definitely not going to be a person who's said, 'There he goes again, writing another of those silly love songs.'"
"The character in [Arrow Through Me] has been wounded. He’s been cheated on. And it could’ve been a great relationship, could’ve been fantastic. As things stand, you couldn’t ‘have found a more down hero’, because there was nobody more down than me at that moment."
"[Dear Friend] is just about a dear friend, whatever it means to you."
"[Junk] is mostly a love song. The ‘bicycles for two’ merge into the ‘sleeping bags for two’. Then there’s the line ‘Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window’, which sounds like one lover saying, ‘Bye-bye,’ and then the other plaintively asking, ‘Why, why?’ even as ‘the junk in the yard’ demands an explanation for the urge to acquire something, or somebody, new."
"[On My Way to Work]: This is a thing I always thought when I was young: ‘How on earth am I going to meet the right person with these billions of people teeming about the planet? How could a soul search everywhere, without knowing what to do? How am I going to run into the right one?’
