What Is The Road Less Traveled Song About?
This is a song about making decisions and living with them. The more decisions you make in life and the further you get in life, the more wrong or imperfect decisions you will have made. And the more imperfect decisions you will make, the more regrets or second-guessing of yourself you will have. This is what this song is about. It’s a song about living life and many people can likely identify with that experience since it’s such a relatable song.
Let’s look at some of this song’s lyrics together. It starts with this setting:
Bracing for the glistening sword, another blow cut my battle short.
I like to write songs with metaphors and the glistening sword is a metaphor for something that usually happens in life. Usually, we brace ourselves for certain challenges or dangers, but then we get hit my a whole set of unexpected challenges or dangers that we now have to deal with.
The next line of this soft rock song goes on to develop this metaphor further by bringing attention to a situation where some of our mistakes haunt us for a long time because we can’y let them go.
This moment echoed in my mind and didn’t budge as dignity became my judge.
That concludes the song’s first verse after which we have the chorus with the following lyrics:
Awareness wants to look away.
But her imagination likes to play.
Regret and pride fought as my mind unraveled.
Looking back at my road less traveled.
The song has a dreamy aspect to it as it talks about awareness and gives awareness traits of a playful person who plays jokes on us as our mind unravels.
This alludes to the difficulty of controlling one’s own mind as it plays and does whatever it wants. But in the end, the mind can easily unravel when it looks back at the decisions and mistakes we made on our road less traveled. It can be especially painful if our decisions lead us to feeling unfulfilled.
The second verse of the song discusses the experience on being on the wrong path while knowing that you are on the wrong path. The challenge is getting off it because we’ve invested so much in our current wrong path that we just keep going forward on it.
Time heals unless self-pity’s your romance.
Wrong decisions kept me in a trance.
My baggage heavier, still I forged on.
Can’t veer off my road….too much time gone.
This transitions the song into a part of the song where something different happens. The hero of the song has a devastating confession or realization that much of his life was spent on fighting himself and trying to overcome his shortcomings, and not be his own worst enemy. This becomes an inspirational song when the hero realizes, with a sense of pride, that even though things didn’t go as planned, he fought hard and gave it a strong effort.
I fought myself right from the start, keeping me from fully following my heart.
Don’t wish my road on anyone – it pained and left me stunned.
But you know what I faced it, fought, wavered, but didn’t run.
It seems like the hero might get another chance to make better decisions and not be his own enemy. But deep down, he knows that he can’t change so easily. Instead, he focuses to embrace his turmoil, which is the thought the song leaves the listener with. It’s inspirational in that it’s real and relatable. Despite the challenges, this does not become a sob song, but rather a song that deals with life’s challenges in the best way the hero of the song can. For most of us, it’s dealing with what you get instead of something more perfect and ideal.
I thought I’d give another chance my all.
Deep down I knew I’d cause myself to fall.
And though I’ve often longed for days without strife,
What can I do? This turmoil made my life.
Watch the video and pay attention to the lyrics. There are deep song lyrics in this song. Many of my songs have meaningful lyrics because I focus on writing quality poetry that I share through my music.
If you like this song, try this playlist of all my original songs:
Thank you for reading and listening. Here are a few other songs similar to this one that you might enjoy:
Guardians of Souls – a powerful and inspirational song about life, being down in life and having art, poetry, and music rescue you.
Another song you might enjoy is The One Who Didn’t, which plays off Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Here it is on YouTube: