Shot By Both Sides

Who's speaking

A first-person narrator who has tried to insinuate himself into a collective (a crowd, a movement, a scene) and reports back with unease. He addresses no one directly except in one intrusion where an unnamed authority figure questions him; the tone is guarded and self-aware, suspicious of his own motives as much as everyone else's.

What happens

The song opens with a set of collapsed distinctions—between legality and reality, between being given something and stealing it—establishing a world where moral categories have broken down. The narrator then describes worming into a crowd, expecting to disappear into it but instead being shocked by what it tolerates; he resists dissolving his identity into the mass. The chorus escalates this into open conflict: he is fired on from both directions, cast out to the margins, and speculates that his opposing enemies have quietly agreed on something between themselves, at his expense. A brief exchange with an interrogating voice near the end confirms his position as suspect or outsider. The song closes by looping the

How it's built