“Taffy Apple Lifestyle People” is the 3rd track on our first full-length, Bear Hair. It’s a vindictive, angry song that a lot of people assume is about “hipsters,” which is a very vague and increasingly-useless term. It may be, but it’s about a specific group of people who I will not name, but I will describe in vivid detail, because they were upsetting in a big way.

They were a group of “anarchist” folk-punk musicians and enthusiasts from a faraway suburb, and when I was 16, they completely disenchanted me from the term “D.I.Y.”, which was most excellently fixed a few years later when I started IOMT. Their politics were flawed and annoying, and it only took one show for me to feel completely excluded and even ridiculed. I left angry, and wrote the lyrics to this song a year later, for some reason. But enough complaining, let’s get into the lyrics:

You’re a human thrift store filled with underwear and socks,
holding it all in each time you talk
There are misguided Time Lords; the last of their kind are constantly shanghaied,
teaming up on decades left behind

The thought of a human mouth spitting out underwear and socks always made me laugh a little bit too hard. This is because I’m 9 years old. The last 2 lines are the first of a few Dr. Who references on the album; this group of people embraced antiquity and romanticized old things to the point where it felt like they were trying to travel back to that time manually, and got lost. This could be interpreted as nice, but the main problem was, they were doing it to appear interesting.

Build up vegan empires, add that to your title
Twigs and leaves will basically help you continue breathing

I get asked about this line every once in a while because we have a few vegans in Island. This line just applies to “fashion vegans” (people who are vegan just to fit into a certain social scene) and very preachy vegans…the kind of people who would form a figurative “vegan empire.” Gooey and Ben are perfect and don’t get mad at me if I eat a steak. I’m not vegan. They are. They do it for themselves.

You’ve got guilty pleasures buried in your sophomore CD case,
worried that your rep will be debased

Embarrassing CD collections are growing more and more common among people I know, and I attribute this to how old we were during the Golden Age of Buying CDs. I know I had a CD case that included Bright Eyes, U2, Phish, and other things that could make me look silly in someones eyes. I am not embarrassed by ANY of this, because I’m comfortable enough with myself to not worry about my tastes. The fact that anybody would get worried about this…well, that’s why songs like this exist.

And you shart on my beliefs like I’m human boxer-briefs
Your cloacae is cavernous and it’s all I can see
And your superficial plunders into identically-dressed lovers
are not even worth noting in electric diaries

“Sharting” is a great term, isn’t it? It’s a shit-fart for you weirdos who don’t know. A cloacae is an orifice in some animals, notably frogs, that both shits and pisses, and I’m comparing their mouths to that. The last two lines refer to the idea of these two kinds of people hooking up not even worth writing about on their blogs or Tumblrs or whatever. Yes, that’s how I angry I was; I even hated their sex.

You’ll ignore what’s important, like your insides and overall purpose,
like making people happy instead of jealous
You get target practice by judging in the aisles of crowded malls
Just be shameless for 2 seconds, that’s all

This verse is really straightforward. All these lines basically say is that I can’t stand people who’s goal is not to make others happy, OR themselves, but to make them jealous, and keep themselves satisfied through that. I think that’s the most banal existence ever, and a TON of people do that to each other. Especially through the internet. People glamorize their lives on purpose sometimes, and will let you know how awesome their lives are just to throw it in your face. These days, I just try and ignore it, and if I’m doing well, I like to thank the people who helped me get to that point. THAT is important to do.

And you shart on my beliefs like I’m human boxer-briefs
Your cloacae is cavernous, and it’s all I can see
And your band with an awesome band name is not unlike The Crying Game
You seduce me with the music, but you’re all dicks underneath

The last two lines refer to The Crying Game, an 80s movie about a man and a woman who start dating…and then the man realizes that the woman has a penis. It’s basically my thinly-veiled way of saying, these bands/people make awesome music, but are sometimes huge cocks.

And I am an entertainer, and besides that, I am nothing
There’s a hollowness in what I do, and that hollowness is haunting
But if I can make you laugh, then this will never be a waste
I don’t care if you’re laughing at me or with me; the smile is on your face

As a singer/songwriter, I sometimes feel like performing a song 100 times starts to make the honesty and rawness of that song thinner and thinner. It’s a sad thing to say, but a song becomes less and less relevant as I get older, and I have to really put myself back there in order to feel the song. But music is actually not the tool I use to validate myself: it’s humor. I overdo humor all the time, and the truth is, I’m happy if you’re laughing in my presence whether or not it’s insulting. I take pride in being funny, whether it’s on purpose or an accident; I’d rather be that way than an over-serious loser.

I’ll close this out with the last few lines, which are self-explanatory:

And if you think you’re too hip for me, then I’ll probably agree
and eject you from my lifestyle and move on and on with ease
Because your approval is a mud-vat, and I am not a doormat
I could throw you at the stars,
but it isn’t worth my arms