Song
Vampires
From Unknower · Track 4 · 2017
A song that renders exploitative people as vampires: entities that conceal motive, take more than they are given, and require other people's blood to sustain themselves.
Lyrics · artist-supplied
In my naive youth I may have held out a hand to hell
Without ensuring that my grip was sure and it felt
Like I fell
And hindsight tends to find me in the blame without an anchor
So fate saw fit to plan a meeting between me and the ground
And I found
To prove their fraudulence they'll take a mile with every inch
They'll pick you limb from limb and try to add to them
They need blood that they can cover the world with
They need blood that they can cover the world with
They hide their true motive and fake a smile to hedge their bets
But don't your failures shine so brightly onto them
They need blood that they can cover the world with
They need blood that they can cover the world with
Nothing's broken, only lost to our obsessions with the past
(oh yeah...)
Never present, always wanting, we can never let this last
(oh yeah?)
To prove their fraudulence they'll take a mile with every inch
Then try to add it to them again
Inch by inch
To prove their fraudulence they'll take a mile with every inch
They'll pick you limb from limb and try to add to them
They need blood that they can cover the world with
They need blood that they can cover the world with
They hide their true motive and fake a smile to hedge their bets
But don't your failures shine so brightly onto them
They need blood that they can cover the world with
They need blood that they can cover the world with
Working interpretation · analysis
Interpretation note: This section is analysis/inference, not an authoritative statement of authorial intent unless the Artist Context above says otherwise.
The metaphor is less supernatural than economic and interpersonal. Predation is framed as an extraction process: a person gives an inch, the predator takes a mile, then converts the victim's loss into part of itself. The narrator also implicates hindsight and self-blame, keeping the song from becoming a simple good-person/bad-person morality tale. The wound is both what others did and the narrator's recurring impulse to revisit how he let them close enough to do it.
Themes
exploitation, predation, blame, hindsight, obsession