Drops of Poopiter

I can't believe it came to this, but I found myself defending Train's song "Drops of Jupiter".

It's not that I have any desire to hear the song currently - I think the 9,000 times back when it came out in 2001 were more than sufficient - but I do believe the lyrical content is stronger than most realize.

On the surface, it's just a bunch of nonsense outer space imagery. But I think the galactic references (Jupiter/Venus/moon/sun/Milky Way/shooting star) are actually part of the joke.

He's singing about a woman who finally returned from her "soul vacation" and he asks, "Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?"

So, my interpretation is that he's singing about a woman who left him for a while because she "needed space". It's not stated directly, but it would explain all of his outer space-related questions as a play on words. Was this "space" everything she hoped it would be? Granted, it's pretty hokey, but also reasonably clever. The fact that you need to work out the "space" pun on your own makes me respect it even more.

Someone didn't want to give Train any credit, however, claiming that since I'm a literature major, I might be attributing too much meaning to the text. So we had to do the unthinkable - we had to look up the inspiration for a Train song.

And, well, I was wrong. I guess the lead singer, Pat Monahan, wrote it about a dream he had after his mom died of cancer and he was picturing her floating off to heaven or whatever. I came up with a perfectly good way to rationalize this dumb song's existence, but the band blew it.

That's the last time I try to give you any credit, Train. Don't count on me to try to rationalize "Hey, Soul Sister" because there's definitely no defending that dumb song.