Hopeless Bleak Despair

I never knew what everybody meant
By endless hopeless bleak despair
Until one day when I found out
The first time I ever left my house
It saw me and followed me home
And stayed with me for my whole life
 
For years and years I wandered the earth
Condemned to a life of bleak despair
Then one day, I looked around and found it had disappeared
 
Hopeless bleak despair, it was always there
And then one day it disappeared
In a puff of smoke, in an unceremonious way
One day it disappeared
 
All I had ever wanted in my life
Was only to be free of it
It drove away my family
It made me lose my job
Whenever anybody saw it
They'd say "get out of here"
 
For years and years I wandered the earth
Sick of my life, looking forward to death
Then one day, I looked around and found it had disappeared
 
Hopeless bleak despair, it was always there
And then one day it disappeared
In a puff of smoke, in an unceremonious way
One day it disappeared
 
Hopeless bleak despair
Hopeless bleak despair
Hopeless bleak despair
 
For years and years I wandered the earth
Until I died and went to Hell
But my despair had ascended to Heaven
That's how I finally got rid of it
 
Hopeless bleak despair, it was always there
And then one day it disappeared
In a puff of smoke, in an unceremonious way
One day it disappeared
 
Hopeless bleak despair, it was always there
And then one day it disappeared
In a puff of smoke, in an unceremonious way
One day it disappeared


Quoth the Johns:

This is what happens when you record the whole song and then write a new bridge, which is then recorded in a different studio with different instruments and inserted into the recording. Kind of like an effect we might go for intentionally. Despair, the author notes, is an unbearable burden that will one day go its own way, perhaps to be enshrined on a heavenly throne.

—John Linnell and John Flansburgh
[source: Emusic promotional email, August 3, 2001]



Corrections? Let me know.