song meanings these r songs from the album: "ENEMA OF THE STATE"
DUMPWEED
That's all about wishing you had a girl you could train. I remember writing the song thinking about my dog. You can train the dog to sit, to be quiet, to be a good dog. But you can't teach a girl to do anything. So I thought that'd be cool to write a song about...If only you had a girl that you could train like a dog, that'd be cool because then she could never make you mad, and she would never be a woman. And women are just a whole different species. So that song was written [like] 'As if...'. Tom's wife, Jennifer got mad about the line from Dumpweed, "I need a girl that I can train..."
DON'T LEAVE ME
Mark wrote that song, so I can't really speak about what was going through his mind when he wrote that one. But I can judge on the lyrics. He wrote that song when he didn't even have a girlfriend, so I don't know who he's talking to. Sometimes you write a relationship song that really doesn't have that much deep meaning. I think it's just like that feeling when you're really in love with a girl, you're just thinking 'Please, please, please don't stop liking me.' That's the gist of the song. All the times you put your feelings into liking a girl, and she doesn't like you at all, and she thinks you're a scumbag. So therefore that song's like a prayer to a girl. Always hoping that you won't make the girl throw up forever, always hoping that the girls will love you. We speak for all males, we write songs hoping that girls will like us dirty rotten boys for a long time.
ALIENS EXIST
As a hobby all I ever do is read books and study material on UFOs and government conspiracies. So I wrote a song about a guy talking about aliens as though he's had a weird experience but nobody believes him, they think he's full of shit. But he's directing his angst toward the government, because the government knows there's something going on. But I'm one of those freaks that really believes that stuff exists. I think if anybody out there does a little bit of research they will find that they side with me. I think it's just a cool song coming from that point of view. I read books about abductions, and there are hundreds of thousands of people a year have an experience at night and they don't know what it is, they just know what they saw and what they felt, but nobody believes them.
GOING AWAY TO COLLEGE
That's a super-romantic song. Mark wrote the song as though you are a boy leaving your girlfriend, after years of school together. After high school, when you're leaving to go to college, and what do you say to this girl that you've been in love with for years, but now have to leave for years? I don't think it gets more romantic than that. It's a sad song and it's really moving. It's one of my favorite songs on the record, and the way the lyrics flow with the music, I just think it's a really sad, emotional song. It's something a lot of people go through. You probably date a girl in high school and grow up with her and learn so much about each other and have so many growing pains and have to leave to go to college. Do you stay with her, do you break up with her, do you have faith in the relationship...? I don't know. That's a cool thing to write a song about. Mark wrote this on Valentine's Day after watching 'Can't hardly wait', in under 5 minutes on a napkin.
DYSENTRY GARY
I wrote that song from a point of view. What if you were a guy who liked a girl, but the girl likes a different guy? It's kinda like 'I hate that guy, but I'm not sure why I hate him.' That's where it's supposed to come from. This guy is really frustrated because this girl doesn't like him, so he's going to make fun of this other guy. 'I can't think about any cruel things to say about him, but fu*k, I just don't like him.' That's the attitude that song has. 'And this girl broke my heart.' That'll make you feel a little bit better.
WHATS MY AGE AGAIN?
It's so cliche, but the reason Mark wrote that song is because Mark is 27, and he's usually rolling around on the floor naked and farting or something in front of a girl, and he'll be laughing. He'll think it's so funny. And she'll be like, "How old are you?" And that's totally why he wrote the song.
ADAMS SONG
The story behind that is Mark read a letter someone sent him as an email, that a kid wrote before he committed suicide to his parents. We kind of got together and wrote this sad, slow song. It came out sadder than we ever thought it would, which is good too. Any song that moves you is good. Some people listen to it and go 'Wow, that's a real bum-out of a song.' But it's one of those things, a story of a kid not being happy in his life, crossed with us being really lonely on tour. At the end of it there's a better way out, there are better things to do than kill yourself.
ALL THE SMALL THINGS
All The Small Things is a song I wrote for my wife while we were recording. I had to write her a song, because I wrote songs about other girls, but I haven't written one for her. So I was kinda getting some heat for that. Not really though, because I love my wife, so I was like, 'I need to write a rad song' because I was scared - if the song came out bad, my wife would be pissed. So I kinda warned her that it would come out bad. Then it came out good, so I was happy. But the lyrics are totally true in that song - 'She left me roses by the stairs.' I remember I came home late one night about midnight and she left roses on the stairs because I was working late every night in the studio. It's a song for everyone to have sex by. In the "All The Small Things" video if you look carefully in the background when Mark is getting wax poured all over him, Tom and his wife Jen are making out.
THE PARTY SONG
That song is about going to one of those parties and people getting drunk and being stupid and girls trying to be the center of attention. It's just about girls trying too hard, acting like dimwits. I think we've all been there, we've all been to those parties where there's all these guys creeping out on three girls who just can't get enough attention.
MUTT
'Mutt' is a song I wrote about my friend Benji Weatherly, a professional surfer who has sex all the time. His name's Benji, but everyone nick named him Mutt, and it's just a song about a guy and a girl who like to have sex and who don't really care about much of anything else. I guess that doesn't really matter, as long as they're having fun. It's not too deep. As long as it seems deep, that's all that matters.
WENDY CLEAR
'Wendy Clear' is a song Mark wrote about this girl he had a crush on. He liked her but he really couldn't date her because she was a very influential person in the music industry. So them dating was a very tricky situation. 'I wish it didn't have to be so bad,' is how the song goes.
ANTHEM
'Anthem' is a song I wrote about having a party at your house, your parents coming home and finding out. I did that to my friend one time. I wanted my band to play - in high school - at my friend's house. His parents left only until midnight, but I still told the whole school that we were playing there. Thousands of people showed up, and then they all had to leave and we had to clean up the place before the parents came back at 12. It was so funny. The whole place chipped in with the clean up, but the cops showed up and his parents found out that way. So he ended up getting in to a lot of trouble. I couldn't believe that I invited all those people over and his parents were only away until midnight. The stereo was broken...there was a fight, there was blood everywhere. It was so funny.
DUDE RANCH - BY MARK
APPLE SHAMPOO
This song is about a girl I had a crush on, and she used apple shampoo, and her hair always smelled like it.
DICK LIPS
This song was written by tom, and he had no title for it. The day that we recorded it, our producer asked what the title for the song was, and tom had none. On that particular day, I was stoked on the phrase " "dick lips" and was calling everyone that name through the whole session. When Trombino asked tom for the title, I suggested dick lips as the name, and tom was stoked on it. We originally were going to come up with a better title when the record actually came out, but we ended up liking the name, and it stuck.
EMO
Emo is actually a style of music, and we thought this song kind of sounded like an emo song when we worte it. During rehearsals, we would say, "hey, let's play that emo sounding song again." The title stuck.
LEMMINGS
Lemmings are animals which follow one another and run off of cliffs into the sea to their deaths. The song is about an old friend of mine who expected everyone to follow what he said was correct. Most of the time, what he thought was correct was really idiotic. He expected us to be lemmings...
A NEW HOPE
This is the actual title of star wars. Watch the beginning credits when the words scroll up the screen.
WAGGY
I made this word up while belching, and wanted to title a song with it. This was the song that got stuck with that title.
DAMMIT
Dammit was written in just 5 minutes, about a break-up that never actually happened.
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