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Well, hello. I’m still testing this.
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Music Notes #1096685 added September 5, 2025 at 6:23am
Restrictions: None
Burning Bridges, by OneRepublic
My fifth Barrel of Monkeys track is another deep cut from OneRepublic's 2013 album Native. I pulled it off a list of 1R tracks with slightly over 25 million streams.
What it Sounds Like
Listening to it now, with my new earbuds - I'm pretty sure for the first time - I don't hear anything particularly notable about the music. It has pretty standard Native style production, with hints of the soaring synths of Au Revoir and other deep cuts. I might call it bland. Perhaps that's why it slipped under my radar for several years.
This time around, I realize Burning Bridges has no bridge… Well, that's ironic! I've known this song since 2017, and I never picked up the pun. I know Ryan did that on purpose, because he did it a few years later in 1R’s 2021 song Savior, where he mentioned the word “bridge” at the bridge. A double irony is that he quite literally has burned his (musical) bridges down these days.
What It Means
The meaning is perhaps the most interesting part of Burning Bridges. I remember being fascinated by two prevailing interpretations of the idiomatic titular expression. On Genius, it was explained as either a positive theme or a negative one.
Negatively, it could be seen as asking to be set free from the relationship. I prefer the positive interpretation, which makes more sense in the context. The narrator sees how valuable the relationship is, sees how he keeps forming unhealthy connections to things beyond it, and is asking for the bridges he's built to everything that could pull him away from it to be destroyed.
Perhaps the best way to explain it is with a visual. I see a couple standing on an island, hand in hand, surrounded by bridges on fire. All they have is each other, and that's all they want.
In my Genius days, I used to love drawing from Ryan's Christian upbringing to help interpret his songs. This one has a clear resemblance to gospel type themes, of wanting nothing to distract from what is seen as the greatest relationship of them all. Even the purifying aspect of fire is significant.
Personal Significance
Despite my initial fascination with Burning Bridges, I've let it slip away from me over the years. I remember I was vacationing in South Carolina when I wrote down the lyrics and proposed explanations for it on Genius. Many memories were made that year, as summer slipped into autumn and I explored the state while exploring music as well.
I'm glad I had an excuse to play it again. It's a song I've been telling myself I should go back and listen to, ever since I saw it listed in a recent article describing 1R deep cuts (all of which I'm intimately familiar with.)
Words: 460.
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