The Fray is yet another band introduced to me by Michael Bay’s “masterpiece”  live-action Transformers movies. They perform “Never Say Never”, Sam & Mikaela’s theme from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I have a ton of affection for that song (if not the scene that it’s used in in the movie), though it’s pretty devoid of depth, so I assumed the rest of The Fray’s art would be as well. Pandora recommended some more of their songs to me, and I ended up with their discography, and well… here we are.

The particular song I picked for this analysis is probably my favorite one of their published works, “You Found Me”. It’s a tough song to listen to as it’s seemingly filled with despair, and also ambiguous enough that it’s a difficult piece to interpret. The imagery invoked by the beginning of this song, of finding God on a street corner, instantly transfixed me. Given the potentially-religious content of this song, I also had my suspicions that it would have a lot of interpretation out there, much of it unsubstantiated. And I was right. To me, what makes someone’s evaluation of a song valid is a detailed deconstruction of the piece, supported by textual evidence. And as usual, that’s what we’re gonna do here today…

Video:

Lyrics:

I found God
On the corner of first and Amistad
Where the West was all but won
All alone, smoking his last cigarette
I Said where you been, he said ask anything
Where were you?
When everything was falling apart
All my days were spent by the telephone
It never rang
And all I needed was a call
That never came
To the corner of first and Amistad

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why’d you have to wait?
Where were you? Where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

In the end everyone ends up alone
Losing her, the only one who’s ever known
Who I am, who I’m not, who I want to be
No way to know how long she will be next to me

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why’d you have to wait?
Where were you, where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

Early morning, City breaks
I’ve been calling for years and years and years and years
And you never left me no messages
You never send me no letters
You got some kind of nerve, taking all I want

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Where were you, where were you?

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why’d you have to wait?
Where were you, where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

Why’d you have to wait?
To find me, to find me…

Analysis:

Again, my feeling about song interpretation is that you can interpret a song however you like, so long as you back it up with textual evidence. Otherwise your opinions are meaningless. With that in mind, let’s take it line by line.

We being with “I found God/on the corner of first and Amistad“. What a great intro! So what we have here is that the speaker has seemingly just stumbled upon God where you would never expect him to be–just hanging out on some street corner somewhere. Interesting…

The speaker goes on to specify that God is “Where the West was all but won/All alone, smoking his last cigarette”. This is a compelling pair of lines. The first is indicative of the notion that God is where he’s not needed–“the West was all but won” already, without God’s involvement. The second line notes that God is “all alone, smoking his last cigarette“. Apparently, instead of being out helping people and benefitting the world, the speaker has discovered that omnipotent God is just standing around and doing nothing, wasting time on trivialities.

The aforementioned line is a major source of interpretive problems, as I’ve seen numerous people say that it’s about the speaker smoking his last cigarette and citing it as evidence about this song being about suicide. While poignant, that’s just not what the text says, so it’s unsubstantiated at this point in the song.

The rest of this verse is a verbal exchange between the speaker and God. To summarize, the speaker questions where God has been, and why he hasn’t done anything to help “when everything was falling apart” in the speaker’s life. The speaker notes that he was waiting endlessly by a phone that never rang, implying that he had been waiting for some sign or help from God that simply never came. These lines are evidence of both the speaker’s desperation for help with his crumbling life as well as the anger he feels toward God for not intervening to help him while God was simply choosing to do nothing to help anyone and watching events transpire.

“In the end everyone ends up alone” is another troublesome line. I’ve seen more than a few people use that line as evidence that the speaker is alone in death and has killed himself and discovered God that way. Given the context of the surrounding lines, I again have to reject the suicide interpretation. This is definitely a verse about how the speaker has lost a girl who was the person closest to him and the only one who fully understood him: “Losing her, the only one who’s ever known Who I am, who I’m not, who I want to be“. In that the speaker has lost his most precious person, he now feels “alone” in the world, as no one else matters to him or understands him in the same way as she did. I see despair and sadness in these lines, but I see no sense or evidence of suicide.

Now we hit the desperation. “I’ve been calling for years and years and years and years/And you never left me no messages/You never send me no letters/You got some kind of nerve, taking all I want”. Obviously, this pain that the speaker is feeling isn’t anything new. It’s said that time heals all wounds, but there are some losses so great that they may never heal if left alone. Losing that one special person can be traumatic enough that it leaves a person broken forever. The speaker tried to reach out to God for faith and support, but God never responded to him, leaving the speaker angry and bitter at God both for not helping him and for “taking all I want”–the person closest to him and the faith the speaker tried to have.

The song ends with the chorus, so we’ll talk about it here: “Lost and insecure/You found me, you found me/Lying on the floor/Surrounded, surrounded/Why’d you have to wait?/Where were you, where were you?/Just a little late/You found me, you found me/Why’d you have to wait?/To find me, to find me…” As far as the lines go about lying on the floor surrounded, it’s tough to decipher an exact literal meaning from them. What we can derive, though, is a symbolic meaning: that the speaker has literally hit rock-bottom. He is figuratively broken and on the ground at this point, having failed for a long time to receive any of the faith and support that he needed in order to hold himself up. Based on this, I’m certain that the “Just a little late” line refers to the speaker’s regret that he wasn’t “found” before he hit rock-bottom. Even so, it was a necessity for the speaker to hit this low point in order for him to turn his life around. The speaker wishes that he didn’t have to wait so long to be “found” and for his faith in life to be restored, but it just wasn’t so.

Summary: I’ve seen dozens of interpretations of this song, including that of the songwriter himself. Some say this song is about faith and religion and God and Christianity. Some say it’s a song about a man who commits suicide. Others say it’s a song about a girl a man has lost and how it’s led to his loss of faith. Before we go any further, let me draw one conclusion: What this song is not about is suicide–I’m totally ruling out any suicidal interpretations. Yes, the speaker “finds” God, and yes, the speaker is desperate–but there’s simply not enough support in the text to substantiate the idea that the speaker kills himself. This is a song about finding hope–not death.

So what is this song really about? It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is at least partially a song about intense grief, loss, and desperation. This is a song about the suffering that occurs when you lose the person you’ve formed your strongest, closest bond with. Losing that person leads to emptiness and a feeling of being totally “alone” and “lost” in life, which in turn results in a loss of faith in the world and people and God and everything else. But this song isn’t just negative–it’s about finding faith and hope again and having your trust in life restored. The speaker finds his faith in everything again once he’s hit the nadir of his life and not before. Even after years of suffering, even after hitting rock-bottom, even after losing his great love, even so–the speaker finds that which he needs to continue on living. In the end, this is an upbeat song, this is an inspirational song, this is a “never give up” song. Don’t stop living. Don’t lose faith. Things will get better. This is a song about having been lost, but it’s also a song about being found.

I wonder if I could ever pose this badass looking...