Ride / Weather Diaries / 2017
Lannoy Point
contemplative, uneasy, cautiously hopeful
Lannoy Point opens Ride's 2017 comeback album with a piece of philosophical pop that treats perception and belief as unstable ground, then widens into a bleak-but-hopeful vision of civilizational collapse and renewal. It's less a story than a meditation, built from paradoxical aphorisms and a repeated mantra that suggests recovery is possible only after some kind of reckoning.
perception vs belief impermanence environmental/civilizational collapse renewal after ruin doubt and reason
Who's speaking
A first-person voice speaking in generalized, almost aphoristic terms rather than to a specific addressee -- part philosopher, part witness -- with a 'we' emerging later that implicates humanity collectively.
What happens
The song begins with abstract paradoxes about seeing and believing, reason and treason, suggesting a mind unsettled by the unreliability of perception and connection. It then pivots to a more historical, almost geological register, comparing the present era to a passing century and invoking extinction imagery, before settling into a repeated hope that a 'better sense' can emerge once the current order has been swept away.
How it's built
Two mirrored verses built on chiasmus-like paradoxes lead into a middle section that shifts scale from the personal to the civilizational, and the song ends by dissolving into a long repeated refrain with a quieter background vocal layered underneath -- structurally miming the very dissolution the lyric describes.
Section by section
Opening verse
“believing is not seeing”
The song opens by destabilizing its own epistemology, setting perception and belief against each other rather than aligning them, which frames everything that follows as suspect or provisional.
Second verse
A parallel paradox about reason and treason extends the same logic to political or moral certainty, implying that conviction itself can curdle into its opposite.
Middle section
“we'll be wiser when we fall”
The scale shifts from personal confusion to species-level history, with the speaker imagining wisdom as something only achieved retrospectively, after collapse rather than before it.
Dinosaur passage
Invoking extinction gives the collapse imagery a geological weight, suggesting the song is less about a specific crisis than about cyclical patterns of dominance and disappearance.
Closing refrain
The repeated hope for renewal, doubled by a whispered background line about believing one's feelings, ends the song in a suspended, unresolved optimism rather than a clear resolution.
Craft
- chiasmus
- The opening lines invert their own terms (seeing/believing, reason/treason), enacting the instability of perception the song is describing rather than just stating it.
- extended metaphor
- The dinosaur and 'swept away' imagery extends the personal disorientation of the verses into a planetary-scale metaphor for extinction and renewal.
- anaphora
- The repeated 'a better sense can start again' functions like a chant, turning uncertainty into a hopeful, almost ritual affirmation by sheer repetition.
- synecdoche
- Feelings and ways of being described as melting into air stand in for the more general erosion of certainty and identity across the song.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on epistemic and ecological fragility -- the personal confusion of the verses (can't trust what I see or feel) scales up into a broader anxiety about civilization's trajectory, with the swept-away imagery gesturing toward climate or societal collapse. A competing reading takes it more personally, as being about the dissolution of a relationship or belief system, with the historical imagery functioning as metaphor rather than literal concern; the lyric's abstraction supports both without settling on either.
Context
Weather Diaries was Ride's first album after reforming, and several of its songs deal with disorientation and renewal, fitting a band re-emerging after two decades apart. I don't have specific confirmed biographical detail about this song's writing circumstances, so this context should be read as inference from the album's general themes rather than documented fact.
Listen for
- the way the paradoxical opening lines are almost tongue-twisters, forcing you to slow down and question the logic
- the shift in scale from intimate confusion to dinosaur-era imagery
- the quiet whispered counter-vocal underneath the closing repetitions
- how the repeated refrain becomes more hypnotic than declarative by the song's end