The Outside
Hidden message
You are not alone
Encoded in the album’s liner notes.
“I can still see you, this ain't the best view On the outside looking in”
The position of the observer is the song's subject, and the view is explicitly the worse one. Looking in from outside makes seeing a consequence of exclusion rather than of intimacy.
“I tried to take the road less traveled by”
A direct lift from Frost, the road less travelled, that the catalogue will return to twice more. Here the speaker frames her position as the cost of having chosen the unconventional path; the road in question is not the literal one but the social one, and the song surfaces the loneliness of having made a choice no one else around her made.
Frost's road, revisited
“I tried to take the road less traveled by / But nothing seems to work the first few times, am I right?”
“And the road not taken looks real good now” — tis the damn season
Community readers trace Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" across the catalogue: the debut's "I tried to take the road less traveled by" takes the popular, upbeat reading of the poem, while 'tis the damn season returns to the same source years later in a register far closer to Frost's actual ambivalence. The pairing shows an early, surface-level allusion maturing into a more faithful one as the writer revisits the literature she once borrowed.
on the outside, looking in
“On the outside looking in I've been a lot of lonely places I've never been on the outside”
“So I look in people's windows Like I'm some deranged weirdo” — I Look in People's Windows
The Outside, from the very start of her catalogue, places the speaker on the outside looking in, never quite let inside. Almost twenty years later I Look in People's Windows makes the picture literal, the speaker walking past lit windows and watching the lives behind them, still the one standing out in the cold.