“Fiction” by Kids in the Way, Tuesday, October 29, 2024
In 2005, when Kids in the Way released their sophomore album, Apparitions of Melody, the band challenged their listeners to a new sound. The band’s first album Safe from the Losing Fight was full of serious emotional punk rock songs. The first one on the album, “We Are,” was a kind of introduction to the band. What was probably meant to be a comment on parenting in America as boomer parents in the 80s and 90s sometimes viewed their children as an obligation to work around busy work schedules and personal lives, ultimately made the band sound immature. If the first album was about childhood, the second album was certainly an angsty teenage one. The album’s first single, the title track, was accompanied by a stormy music video in which they wore all black and performed in a CGI tornado.
THESE DEAD LETTERS WON’T SURVIVE. Kids in the Way’s stylistic change was toward the gothic and emo. Singer Dave Pelsue incorporated more screaming in the verses of the songs on Apparitions of Melody, giving the album a post-hardcore style. As a result, many of the songs were not radio-friendly like the band’s first album, which had three singles. When the band released Apparitions of Melody, many Christian Rock bands started to crossover to rock radio. Flicker Records labelmate Pillar had a hit with the song “Fireproof,” in 2002, also from their second album. In 2006, Kids in the Way re-released their sophomore album, rearranging the tracklisting similar to how Pillar had re-released Fireproof. Apparitions of Melody: The Dead Letter Edition also featured music videos from the band’s career and a new song called “Fiction.” The new song was released to Christian radio and was accompanied by a music video, though the song never charted on non-Christian radio charts. The dark Emo song felt like the band was trying their best for radio. Replaced were the shrill screams or the sometimes overbearing vibrato of Pelsue’s voice with a steady, yet deeply emotional tone. The music was tight, too. Bass and drums led to the palm-muted guitar verse and then to the anthemic chorus.
I HAD THE STRANGEST DREAM… Like much of Kids in the Way’s discography “Fiction” was a song that wasn’t purely spiritual. The cryptic lyrics deal with loss and memories, often misremembered. The speaker claims “We’re making fiction of our lives” yet “burning pages as we write,” implying that the writer is intentionally changing the story, perhaps to make him or herself look better compared to the actual events. The bridge offers a rebuke: “We are not poets / We have no right to make amendments.” Fiction is the answers to the dead letters, unanswered correspondence, between two parties once closely associated. Fiction is the stories that make me the hero and another person the villain. Fiction is the ideologically lost cause we fight for when a closer examination shows us that our world is really narrow and that we should give up those ghosts. The speaker views fiction as a flawed, temporary solace—a means of self-deception that ultimately cannot hold up against the realities of life. Fiction doesn’t survive the burning pages or the passing of time, and the speaker seems to realize that, in the end, stories don't change the truth; they merely mask it, leaving behind only ashes and unfinished, unresolved emotions. But this is only one view of fiction. Fiction as a metaphor explores truth that is too painful to see directly. As a metaphor, fiction instructs and broadens our worlds. Fiction is a tool to be used or abused.
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