All You Had to Do Was Stay (TV)
Hidden message
They paid the price
Encoded in the album’s liner notes.
“Then why'd you have to go and lock me out when I let you in?”
The locked door turns the whole argument of the song: she opened up, he shut her out, and the lock measures the trust that was thrown away.
“All I know is that you drove us Off the road”
His driving them off the road as destructive agency in vehicular form; the crash is his doing, the car the instrument of the ending.
“You drove us off the road”
The drove-us-off-the-road register as the partner's destructive agency given vehicular form. The road as the path they were on together; the leaving it as the deliberate move that ended the journey. The line places the blame in the verb, with the speaker as passenger when the wheel was turned.