A Hefty Catalog Of Wasted Time

Belle & Sebastian “Play for Today”

It’s easy to feel trapped in your life if you’ve bought into a story you’ve told yourself since you were very young, and the only way out of it is to write a new story for yourself. Stuart Murdoch’s character in “Play for Today” starts off feeling lonely and isolated, and trapped in a life story he suspects is very dull. This is contrasted with Dee Dee Penny’s character, who seems no less stuck in life, but takes some pleasure in creating a people-pleasing look and persona for herself, and using her imagination to cope with her buried frustration and hostility.

They agree on a few things:

1. life is a secret
2. death is a myth
3. love is a fraud – it’s misunderstood
4. work is a sentence
5. family’s a drag
6. this house is a trap

Very pessimistic indeed. This all takes a turn in the second half of the song, as the music shifts from this upbeat but strangely hollow mid-‘80s New Order pastiche to something like a new wave gospel tune. As the backing vocals chant “author, author!” the two characters meet and begin to write themselves into new roles. Dee Dee’s character prods Stuart’s to let go of his whole “lonely sad king” routine, because it’s doing him no favors, and is smothering her. As the song ends, the two make an effort to live as though they’re a couple in a movie romance, because as Stuart sings, “we’re braver when we’re on the sacred screen.” It’s a happy ending.

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