From the album Apollo XXI
This is a song about wanting to be understood while suspecting you already are not. Lacy frames it as searching for connection, but the obsessive repetition in the post-chorus gives him away. He is not curious about who else is out there. He is asking if anyone will stay once they know.
I didn't wanna make it a big deal / But I did wanna make a song
Then he makes a six-minute, three-part song with sixteen repetitions of the same line. The casualness is a deflection. This is the opposite of not making it a big deal.
I only feel energy, I see no gender / When I talk 'bout fish, I wanna catch ya, I'm a fisher
He is using metaphor to avoid saying the actual words. The fisher line tries to sound playful, but it is code-switching. He can't say what he means plainly because he is still scared of how it lands.
I used to lay out the labels and pray that one of them stuck / I used to beat myself up, but it's too abstract to scratch past
The breakfast line is the realest moment in the song. Arguing with yourself before you are even awake. That is what unresolved identity feels like, not the Instagram-caption version of self-acceptance.
I cried to the window / No one heard my pain, just my window
The song strips down to something much smaller and sadder. The wondering was a distraction. This is the actual feeling underneath: isolation that nobody can witness.
I fade away / We'll all fade away
He shifts from 'I' to 'we' like it will make the loneliness universal, but it does not. The song ends with him dissolving. The question was never how many people are like him. It was whether he could survive being different.
Lacy wants this to be a song about finding his people. It ends up being about the fear that they do not exist. The repetition is not emphasis. It is stalling. He knows the answer already.