Analyzing Music: MWK’s Vera

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Read the Lyrics


First of all, if Vera is an actual person, I believe it is a love song. Not a happy one but a love song nonetheless, kind of like HATE ME by Blue October (he loves her so much he knows that the best thing for her is to hate him.) I feel this because there is a lot of “If you want me to…” as if to say the narrator (writer Neal Tiemann or who ever he is portraying in the song) will do anything for her, or would have done anything for her regardless of what would have happen to him.


I’ve always thought that maybe “Vera” is in an insane asylum or trapped somewhere else. If you take it at face value she has left so suicide is possible (Lauren thinks that) but I feel like maybe she died after some sort of entrapment weather it be physically (in a prison or asylum for arson) or in a metaphorical sense of mental or physical illness.

If you want me to wait
I'll wait
If you want me to break whatever needs to break
Line up your chains
If you want me to hear
I'll listen
To every word you say…

If you want me to stay
I'll stay
If you want me to take you from this life you hate
I'll face the pain
If you want me to steer displaced
Hand me both your reins





These verses say to me that he would break her out of whatever she felt trapped by, as far as he would even help her die. I suppose that could be an allusion to assisted suicide or simply that he would’ve helped her but she never let him in enough to help her escape, which explains the
You left us all and I can't help to feel a bit betrayed
Your wounds are singing and I distain.


I have always found it interesting that VERA is written completely in the past tense, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard another song that is written that way. I guess it was meant to portray that “Vera” is dead and therefore her life exists only in memory but I always wonder if it is also partially the narrator feeling lost and unable to see a future without her. The only time future tense is used is in the end when he repeats



All the nights you used to fear
All the song you'll never hear
Since the day
All the days becoming clear
All the life you'll never be here


Maybe it’s over analyzing but I read this part as Vera is free but now I’m trapped. Even the fact that he constantly repeats “3 years since the day” it is as if his life restarted when she died and now he lives in a prison of guilt or grief.


So I guess the thing I wonder most about this song, and hopefully one day Neal Tiemann will answer me on this but I doubt it, is who is Vera or what is she representing?