The Cure / The Head On the Door / 1985
Six Different Ways
buoyant but disoriented, cheerful anxiety
A whimsical, slightly unsettled song about fractured self-presentation, built around the conceit of six versions of oneself or one's affections operating at once. The tone is bouncy and playful on the surface but carries an undercurrent of confusion and dishonesty, as the narrator admits to spinning stories to whoever is listening.
fragmented identity dishonesty and self-deception romantic multiplicity dissociation playful unease
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing an unspecified 'them' or 'you' plural, admitting to inconsistency and exaggeration; the voice is unreliable by its own admission, treating its own confessions almost as a joke.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a linear story so much as circle a single realization: the speaker notices multiple versions of himself or his feelings operating simultaneously, and rather than resolve this, he leans into it, promising overstatement and excess to whoever will listen. The bridge introduces a strange, almost hallucinatory image of an American voice and a claim that no one present is identical to before, suggesting the confusion is spreading outward into the people around him too.
How it's built
The song uses a tight verse-chorus loop with minimal variation, mirroring the repetitive, looping nature of the confusion it describes. The near-identical first and second halves reinforce a sense of being stuck in the same disorienting moment rather than progressing anywhere new. A short wordless vocal interjection functions as a release valve between the more talky bridge and the return to the chorus.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song opens with a flat statement of surprise at one's own inner state, immediately followed by the six-ways conceit, establishing the central image before any context is given. This frontloading makes the strangeness the subject rather than a twist to be revealed later.','quote':
First chorus
The narrator openly commits to exaggeration and inconsistency, framing his own unreliability as a kind of generosity rather than a flaw. The self-awareness here is key: he's not caught lying, he announces it.'
Bridge
A shift in imagery introduces an external, almost media-like presence — an 'American voice' — and a claim that everyone around him has changed. This widens the disorientation from internal to social, implying the speaker's fractured sense of self is bleeding into how he perceives others.'
Craft
- numerical motif
- The repeated use of 'six' turns an abstract sense of inner multiplicity into something almost comic and countable, undercutting the seriousness of identity confusion with an oddly specific, arbitrary number.
- repetition/circularity
- Near-identical verses and the recurring chorus enact the song's theme: being caught in a loop of self-multiplication rather than moving toward clarity.
- non-lexical vocalization
- The brief scat-like interjection breaks the sung confession, suggesting a moment where language fails or where the speaker retreats into pure sound rather than further explanation.
- synecdoche
- References to hands, head, and voice fragment the body and speech itself, reinforcing the idea of a self split into functioning parts rather than a unified whole.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as being about the instability of self-presentation in intimacy or performance — the sense of being pulled in multiple directions by different relationships or personas, and finding that fracturing oddly thrilling rather than purely distressing. A secondary, more literal reading hears it as about romantic multiplicity, someone juggling several people at once and rationalizing the deception as enthusiasm rather than betrayal. Both readings are compatible with the text's refusal to resolve into a single stable narrator.
Context
Six Different Ways appears on The Head on the Door (1985), an album often cited as a turning point where The Cure moved toward more accessible, pop-inflected arrangements while retaining lyrical strangeness. I don't have specific documented commentary from Robert Smith on this song's origin, so any biographical claim about its inspiration would be speculative.
Listen for
- the deliberately bouncy, almost childlike instrumentation set against unsettled lyrical content
- the way the chorus melody stays cheerful even as the words admit to deception
- the brief wordless vocal break as a moment of vocal fragmentation
- the repetition structure that loops rather than develops, reinforcing stasis
About The Cure
The Cure are an English rock band formed in Crawley in 1976 by Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst (drums). As of 2026, the band's line-up comprises Smith, Simon Gallup (bass), Roger O'Donnell (keyboards), Jason Cooper (drums) and Reeves Gabrels (guitar).
1977 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue