The nature of fate
The nature of fate is the question of what decides how a life turns out. These songs ask whether an ending was settled before it arrived, whether something with intentions arranged it, or whether it was all happenstance. The question comes up wherever a coincidence looks too neat to be chance. Some of them answer and some leave it standing. What they have in common is that the question gets asked rather than assumed: not who is to blame for an outcome, but whether it was ever going to be otherwise.
Appears in 8 songs
“What if I told you none of it was accidental?”
The whole song is built to arrive at this question and then answer it. Everything the listener has been invited to read as luck, a chance meeting, a good run, is claimed back as arrangement: she set it up, and she is telling him so. It is unusual in the catalogue for being a song about causes that settles the matter, and settles it on the least romantic side. The opening verse puts the two options side by side first, the language of stars and fate against the language of planning, so the question is properly posed before it is closed.
“Seems to be that you and me, we make our own luck A bad sign is all good, I ain't gotta knock on wood”
The verses read the signs and the choruses turn them down, and underneath both is a question about what actually decided how this turned out. The speaker had been keeping her luck up, crossing her fingers, watching for the bad signs. Then the relationship arrives and the charms simply stop being necessary, not because any of them worked but because there is no longer anything to ward off. What the song says, lightly and without ever arguing it, is that none of the luck she had been chasing was what settled it.
“I'm so afraid I sealed my fate No sign of soulmates”
The song starts from the idea that something about the speaker's life was decided before she got to it, written down somewhere by someone, and that whoever wrote it might still be argued with. The bridge is where that comes closest to being said outright. Uncle Jerry names fate and agency as the song's pair on the episode. Underneath the begging is a question the song never answers: whether a life can be set down in advance at all, or whether calling it a prophecy is only what a long run of bad luck feels like from the inside.
“And isn't it just so pretty to think All along there was some Invisible string Tying you to me?”
Years later, two people notice that their lives had been leaving matching traces all along: the same colours running through both childhoods, a restaurant she loves that he had eaten in before they ever met. The song gathers the coincidences up and turns them into a question it then declines to answer. Was something tying them together, or does a life only look designed once you are standing at the end of it looking back? Uncle Jerry brings in Robert Frost, who watched a spider on a flower and asked whether a design that small implies a design behind everything, and Thomas Hardy, who decided it was all blind chance. Angela says the question follows her around. The song borrows its last move from Hemingway, where a character answers a beautiful idea about how things might have been with isn't it pretty to think so, and that is the register the closing question is in: the thought is lovely and nobody is claiming it is true.
“It's no surprise I turned you in 'Cause us traitors never win”
The song keeps explaining its ending before it arrives. The escape is flying that was never going to get far, the affair is a shot in the dark that was never going to land, and when the betrayal comes it is handed a reason that is not the speaker's own choosing: this is what happens to traitors. A song about a woman who informs on her lover could easily have been about her decision, and this one puts the ending down to what the two of them were rather than to what she did. It raises the question of whether it was ever going to go otherwise and answers it, on the side of the matter having been settled well before the car pulled away.
“Fifty in the cast, zero missteps Looking back, I guess it was kismet”
A show goes off without a fault and the speaker reaches, in the next breath, for the word that says it was meant to happen. The hedge in front of it keeps the claim light, but it is still an answer to the question of why the evening went the way it did. Everything else in the song is about what the life costs rather than what arranged it, so the thought arrives once and then goes.
“And counteract the chemistry And undo the destiny”
People tried to break them up and could not. The song calls what they were trying to undo a destiny, which means it was already there before they started. That sits against the life the town had mapped out for her, and only one of the two held.
“Did some force take you because I didn't pray?”
The song is a grief so large it has no frame to fit in. In the middle of it the speaker asks whether anything chose this. Nothing else in the song takes that up, and it reads as a thought that arrives in grief rather than as the song's argument.