Brand New / Deja Entendu / 2003
Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't
sneering, defensive, undercut by exhaustion and sadness
A breakup song that doubles as a self-indictment of its own narrator, who oscillates between grandiose, almost sociopathic self-praise and brief flashes of genuine despair at losing a relationship. The arrogance is the performance; the repeated plea to believe in something is the crack underneath it.
narcissism as self-defense collapse of a relationship performative confidence vs. private doubt media/celebrity self-mythologizing guilt and infidelity
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a former or soon-to-be-former partner directly, with asides that seem aimed at an audience or at himself; the voice is deliberately unreliable, inflating his own importance even as the relationship he describes is visibly disintegrating.
What happens
The song opens with the narrator declaring himself irreplaceable and admitting, almost offhandedly, that he's confessed something damaging. It moves into a fantasy of his own song becoming a cultural phenomenon, framed as a kind of revenge on an unnamed former subject. The verses alternate between petty score-settling about secrets and grudges and bursts of inflated self-regard, while the chorus keeps returning to a much smaller, plainer admission: he wants to believe the relationship can still work, even as both parties have stopped trying. By the bridge the inflated voice gives way to a string of flat, almost clinical statements about loss and consequence, before the chorus repeats one final time, now sounding less like hope and more like resignation.
How it's built
Built on a verse/chorus alternation where the verses carry nearly all the irony and bravado and the chorus is comparatively unadorned and repetitive, functioning almost like a mantra. The bridge breaks the pattern entirely, shifting to a list of short declarative 'this is' statements that read like a verdict being read aloud, before the song collapses back into the chorus one last time without further escalation.
Section by section
Opening verse
“I am all you've ever wanted”
The narrator opens by establishing an absurd level of self-importance, framing himself as irreplaceable and superior to any past partner. The admission that he's revealed something he shouldn't have slips in almost as an afterthought, suggesting guilt he's trying to bury under bravado.
Second verse
The fantasy of the song becoming a hit curdles into something more vindictive — he imagines his ex suffering in a way no one can name or fix. The shift from wanting connection to wanting punishment reveals how much hurt is driving the posturing.
Pre-chorus
Here the mask slips slightly; the difficulty of staying quiet and the futility of secrecy point to an affair or betrayal that's already common knowledge, undercutting his earlier claims of control.
Chorus
“we were contenders, now we're throwing the fight”
The boxing metaphor frames the relationship as something once worth winning that both parties have given up on. The plainness of the language here, compared to the verses' swagger, makes this the song's most emotionally honest moment.
Third verse
“my tongue's the only muscle”
The bravado peaks into near self-parody, with claims of effortless superiority attributed to nothing more substantial than media consumption and manufactured intensity. The line about his tongue outworking his heart crystallizes the theme: his words are doing labor his feelings no longer can.
Bridge
The run of short, flat declarations abandons the performative voice almost entirely. Stripped of metaphor and swagger, it reads like someone finally describing the wreckage honestly, naming isolation and failure without embellishment before the song pulls back into its chorus one last time.
Craft
- dramatic irony
- The narrator's boasts about being flawless, controversial, and universally desired are so excessive that the listener reads them as compensation rather than fact, creating distance between what he says and what's actually true of him.
- anaphora
- The bridge's repeated 'This is' framing turns scattered observations into something that sounds like a legal or ceremonial pronouncement, giving the collapse of the relationship an air of finality.
- repetition as erosion
- The chorus's repeated insistence on wanting to believe doesn't build toward resolution; each repetition sounds more worn down, turning a hopeful phrase into an admission of futility.
- self-aware metafiction
- The narrator comments on the song as a song, imagining its airplay and cultural impact, which exposes the whole track as partly a performance of wounded ego rather than a sincere plea.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the narrator's arrogance as armor: the inflated self-mythologizing in the verses is a defense against admitting he's lost something he can't get back, and the chorus's plain, repeated wish to believe is the truth leaking through the performance. An alternative reading takes the narrator closer to face value — as someone genuinely self-satisfied and dismissive of the partner's pain — making the chorus's vulnerability a lapse rather than a revelation. The ambiguity between performance and sincerity is likely intentional, mirroring the narrator's own inability to tell which voice is real.
Context
This track appears on Deja Entendu, the 2003 album where Brand New moved away from the more straightforward pop-punk of their debut toward denser, more literary and self-lacerating songwriting. Much of the album deals with infidelity, guilt, and the unreliability of its own narrator, and this song fits that pattern; I don't have confirmed biographical detail connecting it to a specific real event, so I'd treat any such claim as speculative.
Listen for
- the contrast in tone between the swaggering verses and the comparatively bare, repetitive chorus
- the vocal delivery on the bravado lines, which often tips toward sneering or mocking rather than earnest pride
- the shift into clipped, declarative phrasing in the bridge after two verses of ornate self-description
- how the final chorus repetition is musically treated — whether it builds or simply fades, which affects whether the ending reads as resigned or unresolved
About Brand New
Brand New is an American rock band formed in 2000 from Long Island, New York. Consisting of lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Jesse Lacey, lead guitarist Vincent Accardi, bassist Garrett Tierney and drummer Brian Lane, the band earned critical recognition as one of the most influential emo bands, and was acclaimed for their musical development and artistic innovation compared to other groups in the scene from which they originated.
2000 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue