My Fictions released their Always Trapped 7” via our friends at Topshelf Records a little over a month ago, and PropertyOfZack is happy to now be hosting a Track-By-Track feature for the release. Check out what the band wrote about the meaning behind the songs on the 7” below!

I wrote these lyrics from around December of 2011 to February of 2012. I believe I wrote them in the order that they appear on the EP, which is good because it means that the album may make sense as the lyrics on it would detail my emotional state throughout those months. I currently study English literature. What I can tell you about my experience studying English is that it has been more about analyzing the works of other people than it has been about my progression as a creative writer. What this means that my creative output during this time has really been limited to what this band releases. There’s no prolific catalogue of stories I can boast about, no book of poetry waiting for the right publisher, and no novels about my life forthcoming. As cheesy as it may sound, these songs are my only fictions. They come from a very real place in my mind and they are based on experiences that I have had, though I do sometimes exaggerate the emotions attached to those experiences in order to achieve what I believe may produce a more emotionally resonant (read: sadder) song. The songs on I Want Nothing were about my desire to change the direction that I saw my life headed in because of short-sighted decisions I was making at the time. Always Trapped is a critical reflection on my entire perspective as a person. It was brought on by a few months of emotional distress that I’m happy to say have since passed, but the ideas I touched upon on those songs are still with me. I don’t know if I’ve been able to change the parts of myself that I first criticized on I Want Nothing, and I don’t know if I can ever find meaningful goals or a purpose for pursuing those goals other than reminding myself that “I have nothing better to do” because I’m too scared to attempt anything prolific. I think these new songs are my way of dealing with old problems that I thought I could flush out of my life with a shift in the way I perceived things. Misery, apathy, jealousy - they are all recurring themes to me and purging them or at least learning to live with them will take more effort than screaming a few songs about them.

A Recurring Dream
I have a tendency to believe that any bit of good luck or any extended period of happiness in my life will be soon gone. “A Recurring Dream” is about my decision that one of these periods of good fortune had indeed come to an end with the end of a relationship and that I needed to figure out what to do to move on from it. I had to rationalize my depression, and I felt that the best way to do this was to convince myself that it was bound to end at some point. It was as if I thought that viewing the world as a place where the status quo is misery and any happiness experienced is a pleasant remove from that normalcy was easier than thinking that my actions were responsible for what had changed in my life. The happiness I felt was a dream that I had woken up from and now that I was faced with reality and sadness and winter three years later, my first task now that I was awake again was to convince myself of how to deal with reality. I had to do it by telling myself that I never wanted that happiness anyway. That I shouldn’t have forgotten or ignored the fact that it was destined to end. That I shouldn’t reflect on my “dream” because it wouldn’t do me any good. My conclusion in the song is that even if I prepare myself for the worst by convincing myself that everything will always have a miserable end, telling myself that won’t change anything because I will not know what the end of a period in my life feels like until I experience it, or until I “lie in that grave,” so to speak.

Coffin Rehearsal
This song’s about memory and the burden it can place on you. It’s also about how the time you spend reflecting on the past can add up and inhibit your ability to move forward with anything else, so it becomes a part of your future as well. Reflecting on the lyrics, one thing iI notice is that I internalized a lot of what was going on in my life in this song - there’s a lot of reference to my thoughts and what’s going on in my head. The lyrics are not only the culmination of a bunch of negative feelings, but they also reflect a desire to know if I’ll ever be able to change how I deal with those feelings. The song title is also a lyric from the song “Fatalist Palmistry” by Why?.

Always Trapped
After this song was written I decided to make it the title track because I think it best describes my anxiety about feeling condemned to a single fate. My restlessness makes it hard for me to imagine picking a direction in life and as a result, I feel that any step I take towards the future is one that will lead me to an inevitable, unsatisfactory end. This restlessness turns into fear of making the wrong decisions, which then leads to apathy on my part because I feel like I’m scared to pursue anything in particular (There’s a line in the song - “Apathy, you still feed on me, endlessly” - that also references the song Same Grave on I Want Nothing that deals with the same issue). The second half of the song is more about how this anxiety/restlessness/fear has inhibited my ability to fully express how much I care for the people in my life, but how at the same time it causes me to reflect endlessly on the past to try to figure out how I became like this. The lyric “There’s no point in trying to forget the past/I am a pillar of salt, and I will always look back” is a reference to Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (which is a reference to the part in the Bible where Lot’s wife gets turned into a salt for looking back on the wreckage of Sodom).