Something I Should Do - Nada Surf

My headphones are playing a duet

With a fire engine (Ah-ah)

I walk through the cloud of an ex

And I feel no tension (Ah-ah)

All the buildings are blocking the wind

Of late October (Ah-ah)

'Round the corner, it shoots out again

And I’m starting over (Ah-ah)

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 (Ah-ah)

Lie in your room like you’re lying on a hill

There’s a mountain on your window sill (Ah-ah)

There is help for raw souls

A language for the shy (Ah-ah)

You don’t have to say hello

But look them in the eye (Ah-ah)

There are 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 distances between us

Sometimes I try to imagine a village hundreds 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

The world is dying, the world is living

(Ah-ah)

(Ah-ah)

There’s something that I should do

But I never know how (Ah-ah)

Things I should say to you

But it’s total whiteout (Ah-ah)

In the night reading actual air

Always reforming (Ah-ah)

Imagine that I’ll be somewhere new

In the morning (Ah-ah)

I was asked to write a song about social media

And I didn’t want to, anyway, I’m pretty hooked

So I 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

I’m still training 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 relation to the tree

But I don’t know what it means yet

That we are partially migrating into a silent conversation

It seems to be increasing unity and tribalism at once

And maybe the two are racing now without a finish line

I was gonna say that likely, few got good thinking done (Ah-ah)

During the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip craze

And this is not so different

But I’ve recently been heartened and disappointed to learn (Ah-ah)

That the story was greatly exaggerated

Anyway, we’re crazy but we’re also not crazy

We’re complicated, we want things to be simple

And we polarize into camps and we harden and entrench (Ah-ah)

And distort and amplify and shut down and entrench some more

Now you don’t have to join a drum circle (Ah-ah)

And get all peace and love and Haight-Ashbury

And anyway, that only took a few months to turn into

A bad scene, hard drug, dystopia where some people will rob you (Ah-ah)

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 (Ah-ah)

Are longer and longer

And some people can’t be beat in an argument

And we have to hold on to that hippie point harder

Empathy is good, lack of empathy is bad

Holy math says we’re never not together