Song Details
- Album Release Date: 2012
- Genre: emo
Song Meaning of “Promise Of The West” by The Jealous Sound
‘Promise Of The West’ by The Jealous Sound is a great representation of the idea of relative success. The song is essentially about a struggling individual trying to make a go of it in a successful urban setting, with a sort of bittersweet wistfulness for something that may never be. The main character in the song is on the edge of the promised land, in many ways desperately trying to make it, but ultimately held back by their own sense of hopelessness and lack of determination.
The song communicates a sense of longing and desperation for a better life that seems out of reach. The lyrical imagery of ‘black ice on the flying bridge’ certainly plays into this idea of a journey that is all too often short early on and often never completed. The narrator’s seemingly desperate desire for escape is perhaps best summed up in the chorus, which sees them singing ‘I’m gonna go west and make something of myself’.
It is both a hopeful and a maybe a pessimistic view that is being expressed here. The main character, despite having a desire to make it, has all but given up on doing so. They are still desperate to leave but the farthest points they seem able to reach are only to the brink of the almost mythical Promised Land. The band that wrote the song, The Jealous Sound, are very much articulating how it feels to be a person searching for something that may never come.
The idea of a final frontier is also present in the song. It is referenced in the first verse as ‘the cliffs of despair’, as well describing ‘the final landing’. This communicates that the narrator is feeling as though they are on the brink of something bigger than themselves but unable to take the final steps to success. They are at the edge of a Promised Land, filled with hope and yet tragically unable to fulfill it.
‘Promise Of The West’ by The Jealous Sound is a hauntingly beautiful track about the struggles of everyday life and almost mythical, impossible yearnings for relative success. Despite the hoped-for ‘promise of the west’, the main character remains confined to their present state of existence, unable to grasp the success they so desperately seek. It is a song of frustrated longing, something that is all too familiar in our daily lives.