My Opinions began with lyrics written around February 2022. I don’t remember a specific incident that inspired them – the inspiration just seemed to be all around me. The earliest recording was an acapella voice memo I made while driving in the rain, awkwardly hunting for a melody with the lyrics in my mind. By mid-March the melodies were mostly worked out but I’d only written about half the song. It wasn’t until late 2023 during a song-a-week challenge that I finally finished it.
Revisiting it now while writing this entry I went back and listened to those early demos. The earliest full version had this bouncy, upbeat fingerpicking feel – faster, more driving, more attitude. At some point I settled into something more laid-back and lost that edge. Listening back I think I prefer the earlier version. I might go back to it.
This is a satirical song. The narrator is someone whose personal identity is so intertwined with their opinions that they can’t separate the two – and yet they have no real awareness of where those opinions came from in the first place.
I used to think I was writing songs like this to point a finger at what I saw wrong in the world around me. But I think it’s more honest to say that these songs are cautionary notes to myself. I’ll take on a character, point outward, but really I’m processing something I recognize in myself. A frustration, a dissatisfaction, a tendency I want to keep in check.
In this case I am writing about somebody whose opinions have gotten away from them – yet I am beaming with opinions about having opinions while I do it.
An opinion isn’t a preference and it isn’t a fact. It’s a subjective hypothesis about a matter, based on the best information I have – with ignorance, limitations and blind spots built in. We are limited creatures. Limited by our senses, by the information available to us, by our ability to understand that information, by time and space. There is only so much you can learn in one lifetime. I believe there is vastly more that we will never know than anything we could possibly learn.
How could I possibly take my opinions so seriously? What troubles me isn’t that we have opinions. It’s when the opinions become our identities. When disagreeing with someone’s view feels like an attack on who they are. At that point the opinion can no longer be examined – it has to be defended.
My opinion is not my identity. I don’t put much stock in the idea of a fixed personal identity in the first place – but that’s a whole other opinion to dissect.
I believe that many of our strongly held opinions weren’t arrived at through any deep process of critical thought. They were inherited, learned, absorbed. We heard something, it fit with what we already believed, we adopted it, forgot we adopted it, and now it’s ours. People will fight over a difference in opinion. They will hurt people. They will hurt themselves. People have killed over a different opinion. And a lot of those opinions, if you trace them back far enough, came from somewhere they can’t even identify.
I’m not exempt. My opinions are suspect too – all of them, including everything I just said.
My Opinions
Where do we go when we die
And more importantly
When we die
Where do our opinions go
I hope that they live on and on
In the hearts of those whom we had the chance
To get up on our soapbox
And mouth off to
Please tell me
Tell me that it’s okay
To stay here holding on to
These words in mind for all time
I call my opinions
In my home the news plays day and night
And it shows me just exactly what the world is like
The newsmen speak so plain and truthfully
So you know it don’t surprise me
That when they talk they always seem to speak
My opinions
My opinions
Where oh where do we come from
And more importantly
Where do these opinions that I call my own come from
I don’t know I may never know
But what I do know Is that I seem to think much better than
A lot of other people
Please don’t tell me
You’ve got it figured out
When words fall out your mouth
Are silly words
That differ from my own
My opinions
My opinions
ericprincessdragon 