A couple weeks ago, Eric Grandy wrote about a nagging question he's always had about The Blow's song "Parentheses"—"It's a minor complaint, as the song is like 99.99% perfect"—off the (fucking great) 2006 album Paper Television. Eric's basic problem is with this lyric in the chorus: "And when you're holding me/we make a pair of parentheses." As Eric pointed out:

A pair of parantheses encasing plenty of space looks like this:

(plenty of space)

But if we're talking about people as punctuation, wouldn't two parentheses holding each other look like:

))

Khaela Maricich, aka The Blow, has written a response to Eric's question. Here tis:

It's nice, and a little surreal, to read that people could be interested enough in something that I have made to nit pick over the grammer and specifications of the imagery. To a certain degree, I feel that if I didn't get the idea all the way across in the song, if there is confusion about what I really meant, then it would be sort of cheating for me to go tacking on notes of clarification after the fact. However, my approach to my live shows has been to use them to put the songs from the album into context and to flesh out what I meant with the lyrics. A written explanation could be viewed as a mini show from the comfort of my couch.

There have been a couple of requests to use the song "Parentheses" in commercials. In a pitch from Secret deodorant, their sketches showed a girl with her arms up over her head that would be shown when the lyrics about parentheses came up. I guess in that case, the metaphorical arms of the deodorant are holding the girl, making her feel safe (by encasing her smell?). I suppose that the feeling I was trying to nail wouldn't be that different from the security of knowing that strangers can't smell your b.o. The subtlety though, and the romance of it for me, which didn't seem to be there in the Secret commercial pitch, is that there exists a person with whom you could let go a bit, someone with whom you could lay side by side, holding each other, unworried about odors, and feel space to talk about things that you don't understand and can't easily describe.

I've been trying to describe that particular indescribable in songs and performances for a long time. In my mind I just refer to it as "the weirdness." Generally, I am trying to address how bizarre it is to exist here alive on the planet, and then the web of awkwardnesses that radiate ouwtards from there. On some occasions I feel like people have understood me. Certain audiences, certain nights, I have felt like the veneer got pulled back and we shared a moment of that strange raw awareness. But I really wonder how the Secret deodorant people heard the lyric about "there's plenty space to encase whatever weird way my mind goes." Does the song just sound poppy enough that they didn't notice that part? Or do they totally get it, and understand that teenage girls do get into existential trip-outs, and believe that this would be a deeper sellng point? My stance lately is to just say the thing that I am thinking about as clearly as I can, and then let people either get it or not get it. It's hard, though, as I tend to be the type who will obsess over whether or not people understand me. It hadn't even occured to me that there could be uncertainty about the physical positioning of the snuggled bodies in the refrain.

Khaela Maricich, ladies and gentlemen.