I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- Sparks Fly / I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) (Eras Tour, Madrid)
- I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) / I Can See You (TV) (Eras Tour, Warsaw)
“The smoke cloud billows out his mouth like a freight train through a small town”
The smoke as the partner's exhalation figured as an oncoming train. The simile works the song's larger argument about scale and incompatibility: what comes out of the partner's mouth is too large for the setting he is in, the smoke staging the disproportion. The motif here carries the partner's presence as something the speaker cannot scale herself to, the train through the small town a figure for what he is doing to the world she has built around him.
“six-lane Texas highway”
The six-lane Texas highway as the partner's scaled-up road. The line registers the partner's history through the size of the route he comes from, the highway as the man's vastness, his unsuitability already encoded in how many lanes wide he is. The road here characterises the person rather than the journey.
“Your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger”
She waves off the need for God's help, setting her own will to save the man above any divine hand, a small act of sacrilege in the certainty that she alone can fix him.
“The dopamine races through his brain on a six-lane Texas highway”
His high is pictured from the inside, dopamine racing down a six-lane highway through his brain, the chemistry of getting wasted blown up into wide, reckless imagery.
“The smoke cloud billows out his mouth like a freight train through a small town”
The freight-train simile renders the speaker's addressee as something massive, loud, and damaging passing through. Full analytical context awaits the I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) episode extraction.
waving off the audience in a religious register
“your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger”
“You ain't gotta pray for me” — But Daddy I Love Him
Community readers pair the two songs on a shared devotional gesture aimed not at the lover but at the watching audience: "you ain't gotta pray for me" set beside I Can Fix Him's "your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger". Both wave off the religious concern of onlookers who cast themselves as the speaker's moral guardians, declining the prayers offered as a form of judgement.