What We Do

Song Meaning

The lyrics paint a picture of being stuck, post-event, with a palpable sense of stagnation. The narrator feels isolated, unable to leave the scene of a faded party, and is grappling with a profound lack of motivation, described as a "lack of faith." This feeling of being adrift is amplified by the exhaustion of emotional response, as the narrator notes, "there's no more tears." The initial verses establish a mood of weary inertia. The central tension arises from the internal conflict between this paralyzing inertia and a nascent desire for change and connection. The narrator expresses a wish to "get up, move out of here," contrasting with the feeling of being "wasting away." This push-and-pull is further highlighted by the shift from "no more tears" to "no more fears," suggesting a potential, albeit fragile, emotional resilience emerging from the depths of despair. A striking aspect of the craft is the deliberate mirroring and subtle alteration of phrases. The repetition of "wasting away" and "chipping away" in the first verse is directly countered in the second with "peeling away" and "tearing away," creating a sense of active, albeit destructive, transformation. This linguistic evolution mirrors the narrator's internal struggle to break free from their current state, moving from passive decay to a more forceful, if still uncertain, process of self-reconstruction. The effectiveness of these lyrics lies in their honest portrayal of a difficult emotional space. The simple, direct language captures the feeling of being trapped and the subsequent yearning for something more. The repeated refrain, "I wanna run beside You," "I wanna talk beside You," "I wanna live beside You," coupled with the concluding "'Cause that's what we do," offers a glimpse of hope and a potential path forward, grounding the abstract feelings of stagnation in a relatable human desire for companionship and purpose.