Breathe (2AM) was Anna’s break through hit in 2005. It is a wonderful song for anyone with any kind of stress in their life. The only was to get past any hardship is to just breathe, because she know what she’s talking about when she says that “we can’t just the track.” Time only moves in one direction, so all we can do is push ourselves forward.
More than Melody is a classic story of unrequited love, or rather of being on the wrong end of someone else’s emotional play ground. People who consider love a game are sick and twisted individuals. It’s not enough to say that you love someone if you don’t care for them enough to mean it.
Soldier will hit home with anyone who has ever loved a member of the armed services, especially if that love didn’t last. The song is about a boy she fell in love with who left to join the military. After that the relationship fell apart. You can almost feel this rip in her heart when she sings “he called me to tell me he’d fallen inn love with her.” It takes a very strong kind of person to survive a military relationship.
For those who aren’t quite strong enough, Drink Me tells a story that you might relate to. He has toyed with her emotions until she couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with it anymore.The torture shows through in the line “I’ll wear my life like a barbed wire necklace.” Finally, she tells him, “I won’t be around to play your games, and there will come a day when you won’t know my name.
Paper Bag is a song for anyone who has ever been picked on. “Yeah, they talk about her. She smiles like she’s so tough. She says, ‘hey can you talk a little louder. I don’t think my heart is broken enough.'” Most of the time, people have enough problems on their own without other people contributing to make things worse.
In the Rough has a similar meaning. Rejection can come in many forms, and they all hurt. All we can do about it though is move on. This song talks about that post break-up healing phase. If you’ve ever had someone break your heart just to come crawling back, you will completely understand the part of the song where she says, “I got your love letters, and I threw them all away. I hear you think that I’m crazy. I’m driving 95, and I’m driving you away, and I shine a little more lately.” It’s a bittersweet and beautiful thing when you can walk away from a destructive relationship.
We all trip and fall from time to time. It is an admirable trait to be able to find personal security with your imperfections. Consider This is a song about admitting and accepting your faults, and being yourself even when others want to try to change you.
The Wreck of the Day is the dip in the roller coaster of life. Sometimes all we can do is give up, “‘Cause love doesn’t hurt, so I know I’m not falling in love. I’m just falling to pieces.” Then we can pick up the pieces when we’re ready to move on.
Many people deal with break ups in a very immature way, trying to hurt the other person to push them away. Sometimes, the healthiest way to deal with people like that is to give them the space they are trying to find. In Bleed Anna sings to an ex, “Well, it takes all of strength to be stable, and I force your insults under the table, and if you were wise, you would compromise, and allow me to live my way.”
Shine, her newest song, is brilliantly inspirational. She tells her listeners to “stop following misery’s lead, shine away.” The balance between fragile and strong is an amazing thing that many of us don’t know how to find, but Anna has found this balance. She encourages others to find their own strength in their vulnerabilities.
