Say what you will about crazytrain Adam Green, but the boy can write sad songs better than anyone else. His surreal (and sometimes disgusting/disturbing) lyrics manage to perfectly describe existential pain. Sometimes when I feel like I wanna get all Emo, I play 3 killer tunes from AG's 2nd album Friends of Mine, 2003.
"I wanna choose to die/and be buried with a Rubik's cube/and sleep inside the big blue buildings/as the sweet disease drives through." Yeah, I think this means he wants to make a choice to die without having to actually do anything about it himself... instead he'd want to just die in his bed in some big blue building without exerting any effort. But to want to be buried with a Rubik's cube? I guess that means he wants to know there is a solution to the problem and hopefully he'll finally fucking get it once he's dead. I feel that!
The opener alone is enough to make you want to cry. "Picture a place that's far from danger./A nicer place to cash your chips/I'm not the one holding you hostage/squeezed in between my lips./We're not supposed to be lovers/or friends like they'd have us believe./We're not supposed to know each other/accept my apology."
But it's the end that gets me every time. "Picture a person you've forgotten/kissing your brother or your friend./Picture a wounded entertainer/cutting his hair again." While we can all get what he's talking about in the first part: you'd want to kill your brother or friend for making out with one of your old lovers, it's the last lines that I find most poignant. Everybody knows that one of the best things to do after a heartbreak is to go crazy, cut and dye your hair, get a whole new "look" and get on with it. Poor Adam.
The most gut-wrenching of all is Bungee. I don't know why. Adam talks about incest and the Clap and Indian chiefs and priests, but there's something so disorienting and devastating, almost as if it's straight out of a nightmare, about "she went bungee jumping/one fine day/off the cliffs of our friendship/and at the bottom she stayed./when they told me/that her body was found/an astronaut drowned/in the long island sound/i tripped down the stairs/in my basketball shoes/and paddled downstream/in my father's canoe." I think it's the juxtaposition of something so tactile like "basketball shoes" with the metaphorically dead body of the girl and the dreamlike strings of the music.
The video below is pretty bad, but unfortunately Adam doesn't usually perform "Bungee." So instead watch and see how fun he is and how much German people are obsessed with him.
