Song Meanings: Wye Oak - "Civilian"

I am nothing without pretend
I know my thoughts
can't live with them

I am nothing without a man

I know my faults

but I can hide them

I still keep my baby teeth
in the bedside table with my jewelry

you still sleep in the bed with me

my jewelry, and my baby teeth

I don't need another friend

when most of them

I can barely keep up with them

perfectly able to hold my own hand

but I still can't kiss my own neck

I wanted to give you everything

but I still stand in awe of superficial things

I wanted to love you like my mother's mother's mothers did

civilian
civilian

Wye Oak is a duo comprised of Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack from Baltimore, MD.  The song also lends its name to Wye Oak's third full length, released earlier last month.

For me, the meaning behind the song centers on the public and private selves we create and how they intersect, overlap, and converge; how, over time, the person we have evolved into has to grapple with an ever changing version of itself.

Without even trying, each of us create multiple personas that dictate and influence the ways we interact with certain people, places and situations.  Think in-laws, work, family functions - our rituals for behavior in these situations are each different from the other.  

Therefore, versions of ourselves exist with each person we know - everyone knows a different part of our story, but none knows the entire narrative.  The private self (i.e. you) is the only one that does.  So is the private self a recognition of pretending; acting at "being yourself"?  I'm not a student of philosophy, but I seem to remember existentialists calling this the "inauthentic being" - because we have consciousness of the self we can never fully participate in being.  We take cues from our cultural notions of what it means to be a father, or employee, or a coach, and we take those shared stereotypes and integrate them into the way we act.  Therefore, we're always in a state of "acting" as ourselves as a perception of what we see around us.

This idea of pretending opens the song - Wasner singing "I am nothing without pretend".  She divulges that she "knows her faults" but that she can hide them - her private self.

In the second verse the idea of baby teeth, representing a past version of herself and equated to something valuable, jewelry, is co-mingled with the bed where she sleeps with a new lover - the simultaneous convergence of herself past and present collides, suggesting this is the state that the protagonist "can't live with".

The relationship teeters on failure in the third verse with Wasner confessing that she doesn't "need another friend". She wanted to "give you everything", but can't.  Her inability to reconcile those things that are "superficial" stands in her way.  I take that to mean that she is unable to reveal her private self in any meaningful way.  She feels she is unable to live up to the standard of love set in her mind, like her "mother's mothers mother".

In the end, she is left a civilian - no longer part of the battle to keep things together.