Inside the song ‘30’ (from an outside perspective)

“I used to run for miles, I used to ride my bike
I used to wake up with a smile
And go to bed at night with a dream (ah)”

Set in the literal context of being forced inside, he starts the song by listing outdoor activities: running, biking. There’s an interesting linkage between what the song is broadly about (reminiscing about our lost youth) and what he’s opening with (reminiscing about what we lost in the immediate sense, due to the pandemic).

Under quarantine, we lost a year and were reminded of this in different ways, including celebrating birthdays during a pandemic. Birthdays also remind us we can no longer go back to a certain period in our lives. Those celebrations hit us over the head with this fact, just like staying indoors tinges the qualities of life we normally wouldn’t have given a second thought to with a color of nostalgia. Our days weren’t always filled with the constant dread of a virus. We woke with a smile and slept dreaming.

But we aren’t smiling anymore. And we are left awake indoors, unable to dream.

“But now I’m turning thirty (no!)”

The way we did things is over whether we like it or not. We’ve entered “a new normal,” of wearing masks and staying inside. We’ve collectively turned 30, and we hate it.

When he says “no!” it’s done in a comically childish voice. Despite being older he’s still immature; in fact, the entire song is, it’s a vocalized tantrum and illustrates how we don’t necessarily mature once we cross the threshold into 30. We’re still ourselves, yet different all the same.

“I used to be the young one, got used to meeting people
Who weren’t used to meeting someone who was born in 1990
No way! (Yeah, I was born in 1990)
Now I’m turning thirty
God, god damn it!”

He references more examples of activities we used to do pre-pandemic, then transitions into why turning 30 is so frightening: you’re no longer a novelty. As you get older you begin to hang out with people the same age. This homogeneous crowd means you’re not special anymore, that no one is envious or admiring you just for existing.

This can also be a reference to his anxiety over the question of whether turning 30 will make him irrelevant as an entertainer.

Side note - he interrupts his song with phrases like “God damnit,” these moments give his anger and disappointment their own agency, pushing their way into the song and cutting himself off. We’ll see more of this later.

“I’m (turning thirty, turning thirty)
(Turning thirty, turning thirty)
Turning (turning thirty, turning thirty)
(Turning thirty, turning thirty)
Thirty (turning thirty, turning thirty)
(Turning thirty, turning thirty)
I’m turning thirty (turning thirty, turning thirty)
(Turning thirty, turning thirty)”

The chorus is set to a faster tempo — making it sound overwhelming and giving it a taunting edge — while he sings at a slower pace. This contrast thematically aligns with the special of Inside, which plays around with seemingly opposing elements, like being an entertainer for no one.

“When he was 27, my granddad fought in Vietnam
When I was 27, I built a birdhouse with my mom
Oh fuck (oh), how am I thirty?…”

Side note - notice the reference to another type of interior: birdhouse.

Comparing where our parents were to where we are at the same age creates a jarring reality. Traditionally, the goal is to create a better life for your kids. But this also results in a strange guilt those kids might feel later on. We’ve inherited certain comforts that can make our complaints feel…silly. He’s upset about turning 30, but he didn’t have to go off to war. What does that mean for him? What did we do to earn this milestone? Are we really adults if we’re still building treehouses with our moms?

“I used to make fun of the boomers
In retrospect, a bit too much
Now all these fucking zoomers
Are telling me that I’m out of touch? Oh yeah?
Well, your fucking phones are poisoning your minds, okay?
So when you develop a dissociative mental disorder in your late ‘20s
Don’t come crawling back to me
I’m (turning thirty, turning thirty)…”

Having compared himself to his grandfather (younger to older), he now flips that and compares his behavior to Zoomers (older to younger). There’s a certain circularity to aging we all go through. As kids we made fun of adults, only to end up becoming those adults on the receiving end of the same insults.

Except, a funny thing happens. The endless warnings we had ignored from adults as kids, may not have been so melodramatic. There’s humor to the line “phones are poisoning your minds,” because it sounds like an overly generic threat, but then we hear something far more serious in his follow up about developing a “dissociative mental disorder.” The latter hits closer to home, as if he’s now talking about himself, acting like an old doomsayer to the masses.

As mentioned earlier, his internal frustrations keep interrupting his song. It’s like he’s struggling to decide whether he wants to sing or rant. Duel impulses that overlap and crash into each other, adding a chaos to the melody and painting a frenetic picture of what it’s like in his head.

“And now my stupid friends are having stupid children
Stupid, fucking ugly, boring children”

And here we have another marker of the passage of time: friends turning into parents. His insults are something a kid might say, and the bitterness and annoyance here is clear. But why is he so mad?

Children embody the future. So while he’s lamenting the loss of his youth, questioning what it even means to be 30, trapped in an arrested development of sorts and raging against the reality of the present moment (i.e., the pandemic) — his friends are looking ahead, bearing children for a future that looks utterly bleak given the circumstance. This blind optimism is irritating for him.

“It’s 2020, and I’m thirty, I’ll do another ten
2030, I’ll be forty and kill myself then”

Right along the heels of parenthood he mentions its antithesis: solitary suicide. It’s framed in a casual manner, and immediately undercut by the next scene where he tells the audience he didn’t really mean it…except, he does have those feelings. There’s a kernel of truth to it, and the song fights to get a handle over it.

The pandemic forced us all inside. It ended so much of our lives and trapped us within ourselves, ruminating over what we lost. On top of that, we had to celebrate our birthdays in isolation, growing older and facing insecurities about the future with no one to share it with. It’s an angry song masked in comic relief. And you feel it even more knowing his pain is relatable to your own. This shared reality is comforting but also heartbreaking, because he’s singing to you on a screen, in your living room, to an audience of no one.