we got over Saved by a Stranger too quickly. i decline to accept that this was written about anything but personal experience since the documentary. maybe the sequence of action isn’t true, but the feelings behind it seem to be. and it’s such a moment…
the anonymity that he doesn’t have - I don’t even know her name, but I was saved by a stranger. isn’t that the fan experience? we don’t know him, but people tell him he saved them over and over again.
the on the brink sensation he’s not allowed to express - the night she talked me down. I imagine it’s challenging to be an eldest sibling, a role model for millions, and try to shake that indebted obligatory sense of having to be solid. he can’t tell fans - younger or older - that romanticise and idolise him or his journey how tough it really is, how dark the dark moments really were. he’s said it before — ‘no one wants to hear that’— so he wrote it down. explicitly stating this song is a concept - which may also be true - serves the need to reassure.
someone else’s fantasy is nothing like reality, I know that - the stories we tell ourselves about his life probably aren’t true and the minefield that is to navigate seems like a monumental headfuck; this can be boiled down to ‘don’t believe your own hype,’ but I do sometimes wonder how difficult it must be to have your life, your story, the sum of your moments written and immortalised by others with no regard for the truth, or the truth you want to tell, how fame is both permanent and fickle, how fans still quote interviews from 2013 that he can’t even remember - for a moment stay with me, and let me feel the freedom that you’re holding - this is vicarious living, this is grass is greener mentality, this is don’t let me go, don’t leave, let me see the world like you do
there’s a reason this song was released for fans only, and I think there’s a lot here lyrically
“I’m not gonna lie, that was a song that I wrote, but it wasn’t really from personal experience cause on the first record I wrote only from personal experience, you’re then limited by your own personal experience. For me, it was important for me on this record to kind of look outside of myself and write about maybe some imaginative situations and that was one of those really, it was a kind of a story that we came up with in the moment. There’ll naturally be lyrics where there is some personal insight in there but in terms of the concept and the story itself, it was kind of just created for that song.”
-Louis on what inspired Saved By A Stranger. (11 November 2022)
Just listening to change this sunday morning and crying my little heart out cos how is it that so much in my life has changed since when I first heard this song at afhf and to now and how this music is still one of my only constants and I just have to say I quite literally wouldn't be here without him, I found him when I needed him the most and without even realising it, he became my stranger along with millions of others ❤️🤧 thank you louis. Happy 32, here's to many many more 🥹