Happiness Is Overrated

The Airborne Toxic Event's debut self-titled album is full of lyrics which involve a rejection of happiness and this song is the most obvious example. In an interview with This is Fake DIY, songwriter Mikel Jollett was asked if this was a conscious decision. He replied: "No, these are just the songs that swung. We wrote about 100 songs for the record and 10 of them made it on because they were the ones that swung the most! We just liked them. It wasn't a conscious decision. Your point about it being a lot about rejection is what I was going through. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I just read, there's a great line in there that says, "The right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril". You can't write about things honestly if you're trying to dress them up, so that's what I was going through at the time. I'm not really going through that now. Someday I'd love to write a record about falling love with a beautiful woman and having a wonderful family and children. I think from the outside a lot of this stuff looks a lot more intentional than it is. I can understand that. You sit down to write and this is what happens. For me, there was no intent to it and we're not really trying to make a statement. I'm not trying to make a statement. They're just songs about feelings."