Lyrics Nada Surf – Something I Should Do

My headphones are playing duet
With a fire engine
I walk through the cloud of an ex
And I feel no tension

Dance, dance
Dance, dance around the door
Dance, dance
Dance, dance around the door

Hold still
Limit what you see
Be free for a while
Lie in room like you’re lying on a hill
There’s a mountain on your window sill
There is help for raw souls
A language for the shy
You don’t have to say hello
But look them in the eye

Two things, a great fog of stuff, engrossing, fleeting, bewildering
And then, a feeling of tilt that we’re rushing down a slope
Do we not see it all the time because we’re sliding at the same speed?
A sense of safety preserved by the static distance between us
Sometimes I try to imagine a village hundred of years ago
Where little changes during a lifetime
Maybe the cobbler tries a new heel on a boot, crops are rotated
But nothing changes how people are
What they spend their time doing or thinking about

There’s something that I should do
But I never know how
Things I should say to you
But it’s total whiteout
In the night reading actual air
Always reforming
Imagine that I’ll be somewhere new
In the morning

I was asked to write a song about social media
And I didn’t want to anyway I’m pretty hooked
So don’t feel I’m in much of a position to critique it
And self-critique is loaded for me anyway
Because I’ve done plenty of that
And while I know that people can identify with it
And get comfort from hearing someone else
Address themselves sternly
I’m also trying to get away from self-regard in general
Even though the unexamined life is not worth living
More opposing truths, they’re everywhere
Still training to to hold them
I’m trying to look out
Leave the mirror out of it
See the tree and contemplate it
And not question who or what I am in a relation to the tree
But I don’t know what it means yet
That we are partially migrating into a silent conversation
That seems to be increasing unity and tribalism at once
And maybe the two are racing now without a finish line
I was going to say that likely few got good thinking
Done during the seventeenth century Dutch tulip craze
And this is not so different
But I’ve recently been heartened and disappointed to learn
That story was greatly exaggerated
Anyway we’re crazy but also we’re not crazy we’re complicated
We want things to be simple
And we polarize into camps and we harden and entrench
And distort and amplify and shut down and entrench some more
Now you don’t have to join a drum circle
And get all peace and love and Haight-Ashbury
And anyway that took
Only a few months to turn into a bad scene, hard drug, dystopia
Where some people will rob you
And you can’t be too open but the
Hippies sure had a point
Empathy is good, lack of empathy is bad
And now the lines of non-facts waiting to get in the conversation
Are longer and longer
And some people can’t be beat in an argument
We have to hold to that hippie point harder
Empathy is good, lack of empathy is bad
Holy math says we’re never not together