Lonely

Album: Go to School (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a track from Go to School, a concept album that tells the story of Shane, a chimpanzee raised as a human boy who goes to school.

    This raw, personal song was written by the band's Michael D'Addario when he was 15 about being lonely at school. As it was written from the perspective of a teenager he thought it would be cool to include it on the record because it was so genuine. Michael explained to Billboard:

    "It's got a line about waiting outside of school for your parents, and then the other people talking about hanging out, but they don't mention, 'Why don't you come?' And that's silly, but I think I wrote that a couple years ago when I was 15.

    So, when we were recording it this year, I decided, 'Let's just do it exactly the way I wrote it then.' It was really genuine and it's rare for things to be produced on this scale, but have a lyric that came from a real 15-year-old heart. It's even more interesting than just being a guy who writes musicals and putting yourself in the 15-year-old's shoes. Things like that happened, a lot of natural things like that. It was a natural process."
  • Q magazine asked Brian D'Addario why they chose to make a monkey the lead character of their concept album. He replied: "We were thinking about this totally innocent, very pure character who came from a different place to all the other characters in the story, who came from a more cynical place. We thought, 'Oh, maybe this could explain why he's unlike the rest of them, why he's more in tune with his soul, because he hasn't been corrupted."

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