Hands Down - Intellectual

Again, we see the here and now, the focus on the present rather than on expectation of the future: our hero and heroine have slowed down, and appreciate the sensuality (the divinity) in the everyday moment. This sets the tone for a lot of the rest of the song: in the racing of controlled hearts, in the smoothness of her legs grazing his, in doing nothing at all on a dull night, they are doing fine, they are driven wild. The sexuality of these lines come from appreciation of life’s little pleasures.

There’s also a commentary here on expectations. As Seattle rapper Macklemore noted in his song “Vipassana,” paraphrasing Buddhist teachings:

Expectations are resentments waiting to happen

What this means is, your “high hopes” are a disappointment waiting to happen (it might kill you), because the future isn’t guaranteed, and likewise, dwelling on the past is useless, because it’s gone and irretrievable. So you should open up to whatever is coming.

That’s what Chris does here, offering his heart to the girl in the song: but also, to the path ahead.

Chris Carrabba eschews his more typical emotional abstraction in lieu of gorgeous imagery. In Brand New’s “Jaws Theme Swimming,” Jesse Lacey paints a vivid picture of a foreboding city with three words:

Concrete and water

Chris is only slightly more verbose, and paints a very different picture: instead of a menacing city to get lost in, this is comforting home turf. Even obstacles are overcome by love: the gate bars entrance, but no matter, Chris jumps over and unlocks it from the other side.

Continuing from the last section, the rain and the kiss and her hands on his waist, everything, is drenched in that remarkable feeling of invincibility that accompanies young love.

Everything in these lines suggests that everyday things and events have been imbued with special meaning by the “racing hearts” and “high hopes” of this night; or rather, they were always meaningful, but Chris needed to open himself to their beauty and their holiness before he could see it. As William Blake wrote:

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern… If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

The sound of the stereo…

…the dim of the soft lights…

…the scent of your hair that you twirled in your fingers…

…the time on the clock when we realized it’s so late.

The clock is the key to understanding the entire lyric: our hero and heroine have lost track of time and space, stopped trying to control them but rather just accepted them and begun to pass through them with consciousness, rather than distraction (another idea taken, whether intentionally or not, from vipassana Buddhist teachings). When you stop to smell the roses (or the hair) time becomes meaningless.

Capping off the song with heart-wrenching fidelity to his lover and an outburst of unbridled emotion, Carrabba sums up in the song in one phrase: “you meant it.” Earnestness, honesty, sincerity, and self-assuredness are all wrapped up in a ball in that one line: everything that Dashboard Confessional is all about. This line also suggests that the two young lovers stuck it out for the long haul.

The sheer emotion of the situation, mostly the anticipation, is too much to bear, but in a weird way, it’s all that’s holding him together. The wordplay on “kiss” and “kill” is pretty cool: Chris sets it up by saying her kiss might kill him, and then asks her to kill him: in other words, to kiss him. Pretty smoov in a tres pathetique sorta way…

Note that remembrance implies that the narrator is looking back on the events in question from a vantage point in the future, which begs the question: did things work out? Like, in “the long haul”?

In this lyric, Chris (or his character) is giving himself up entirely to his lover, do what she will. It’s been said that if you love something, let it go, if it comes back to you, it’s yours. But Chris offers up his very heart: destroy it or casually play with it; even if I know better, I couldn’t do otherwise. Chris opens himself up to whatever is coming next.

Every couple feels like their relationship, their couple, is different from the rest of those bozos. And maybe they’re right. Remember what Corey Matthews said in Boy Meets World?

Every statistic that you throw at me is gonna be about other people. I don’t care about other people. Okay? I care about you and me. If every marriage failed except one, I guarantee you that one would be ours.

Here the young lovers escape the prying eyes and “questions” of their peers, who don’t know about love, and just aren’t as damn enlightened, you know? But… of course… even though asking about it is crude… they’re just kids, what’d you think was gonna happen?

Within the first lines of the song, the Christian singer belies the deeper meaning in the seemingly secular song. The word “blessed” implies a latent divinity in the air. And let’s not forget that monitoring your breathing is a meditation trick designed to focus us on the here and now. She breathes in for luck, which is in an expectation of the future, but subsequently breathes in deeply, and appreciates the air she’s sharing, here and now.