From the album The Wake
This is a song about losing faith in people so completely that you start to wonder if the problem is you. Vance frames it as brutal honesty, but the real question underneath is whether calling everyone else sleazy means you're clear-eyed or just broken. He's not celebrating his cynicism. He's mourning what it cost him to develop it.
Please don't take me as I am / I am not a simple man
He warns you off before you even get close. The phrasing is telling: not 'don't judge me' but 'don't accept me as I appear.' He knows his bluntness reads as hostility and he's almost apologizing for it in advance.
Then I caught him hands as red / As his blood his face his head / In the cookie jar and stealing
The repetition of red drowns the image in guilt. 'Cookie jar' makes the theft childish and pathetic, which somehow makes it worse. Small-scale betrayal burns hotter than grand larceny when it comes from someone who promised to help.
These days people aren't something / I recognise / And in their eyes / I can see the truth that's hidden
This is where the song shifts from anger to grief. He's not just calling people fake anymore. He's saying he can't recognize humanity itself, which means the cynicism has metastasized into something lonelier.
But I am not the man I was / And it's because of sleazy bastards
He blames them for changing him, but the song never proves they're wrong about each other. Maybe everyone's a sleazy bastard now because trust died and took honesty with it. The tragedy is he knows he's lost something and can't get it back.
The song ends with him admitting he's changed, which is the closest he gets to vulnerability. Whether that change is justified or tragic depends entirely on whether you believe his read of the world. Either way, he's alone now.