Objects in Space Lyrics
Books, kitchen things, objects with specific purpose or none
Arranged them sideways in a grid on the floor there unmoored
Out of context and then considered it
First the whole picture, then everything individually
Humming along at the deadest pace imaginable
One object then another and then the next
And I wondered what they meant there
If they meant anything still
Found notes
Camping supplies
A book you bought in the desert
“Identifying Wildflowers”
Pictures from vacations
From parties
Kitschy gifts we bought from rest stops
On that road trip out West
Objects
Everything itself
And then memory
All of it laid out there
From the dining room
The living room
The hallway and the basement and the kitchen
From that room we called the office
But never used
Even the bathroom
Everything laid out there on the floor on the carpet out of context
Today I moved everything from the floor to the table in the dining room
Placed each thing carefully without reason or at least without one I understood or could describe
There on the table together and when I was done and stepped back I realized what I had made
Keepsakes
Pictures
Letters
Ordinary objects all collected there
A memorial
And I thought of ones on highways or set by gravestones
All the things you see there but don’t understand but still bring a remembered thing back vividly
Invoke someone’s reality when there together in that place in that way out of context
And I knew I had to take it down before anybody else saw
Tomorrow I plan to put them all somewhere
Those things
In boxes
Side of the road
Attic maybe
All these things that push and pull me through history
To places I once was, places I might’ve gone, places I ended up going
Postcards
Ticket stubs from one thing or another
A personalized coffee mug neither your name nor mine
Phone cards and old phones
A page from an old calendar I bought once at a thrift store and insisted on hanging
That cycles of the moon print
Photos
Old boots of mine
And I sat there for hours
In the living room first
Then in the dining room
Moving things around
Picking things up and seeing where they took me
To what place in history
What moment on our timeline
Where we were, where I was, where I thought we’d end up
In this house or on the highway
Driving somewhere near Christmas
In the desert or anywhere else
And I put them in boxes
About
In this song, the couple have parted ways (as described in ‘First Reactions After Falling Through Ice’ and ‘For Mayor In Splitsville’) and he is packing her things. In the process of packing her things, he’s reminiscing over both their good and bad times.
As said by Jordan himself: “A couple of weeks before we went to record, I was experiencing a fairly severe bout of writer’s block. So one of my really good friends and I went to a few thrift stores in town. I’m a bit of a hoarder and a perpetual collector of pretty pointless things that I, for some reason, find myself attached to. So we took some of those things and went to the stores and bought a bunch of items that felt like they might have been part of somebody’s story, and we took them back to my folks’ house in Grand Rapids. We cleared out a whole room in their house and we spent some time arranging these objects and taking pictures, partly to document the process but also trying to delve deeper and get myself out of that funk. I remember my mom came home and asked me if I was making a shrine to someone. It felt like this odd grieving process for something, for someone. So the initial impulse of that song was the same as the initial impulse for the whole record, which was picking up and moving things and thinking about friends I had and didn’t have and relationships I’d been in and no longer was in and family members and whatever else. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that day seeing pictures of these random animal statues and photographs and all these weird things we’d just bought or dug out of the attic. It felt like an appropriate way to conclude everything.”
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
When asked by Noisey about Objects in Space Jordan said
It felt like an appropriate way to conclude everything. Because it’s a record about moving on – or if not moving on, learning to re-appropriate these things and incorporate your past into your present and then into your future, instead of just completely throwing it away or always being at odds with it.
- 6.35
- 11.Objects in Space
