How can you know what the song is about without understanding the title?!
But to break artist convention and to just spell it out: “Friday’s Far Enough For Milk” is about living in a world where you are constantly asking yourself the question of what is still worth doing given that you think it’s quite plausible the end times are near. It becomes a habitual pattern to ask “is this thing still worth worrying about if it will only matter in a few years, or maybe even months?”.
As you stand in front of the milk for the supermarket, and you ask yourself “is it still worth worrying about whether this milk will go bad?” the answer becomes “well, I’ll probably have until Friday, and Friday is still good enough for milk to go bad” (and of course the romantic component of the song is that yes, this relationship is still worth caring about, because you definitely have until Friday, and Friday is long enough for this relationship to be worth it).
Makes sense. And to be clear it’s not necessarily about “to go bad” just a general “to be worth thinking about”. It wouldn’t be an invalid interpretation to be like “Friday is far enough to think about whether this is too little milk, or whether I will run out of milk, or other random grocery related considerations”.
This title bounces off my brain too, and I did some thinking about why.
The sentence “Friday’s far enough for milk” is obviously a shortened version of a longer sentence. There are a few ways the brain might try to fill in that longer sentence, and mine does something like this:
“Friday is far enough from now that buying milk is worth it”. This is weird: Does this imply that if Friday were closer to now, then buying milk wouldn’t be worth it anymore? The whole point is that milk is relevant on a Friday-like time scale, and Friday is close enough to now that buying milk is therefore worth it. So I think that this is where the primary confusion comes from: the most straightforward fill-in of the sentence (at least to my brain) leads to the opposite of its intended meaning.
The real sentence-extension goes like “Friday is far enough for humans to survive to make buying milk now worth it”. The whole “humans and surviving” part is crucial: if your brain doesn’t fill that part in immediately from context, then your reading of the sentence will be wrong. Friday is not the thing that is far enough away; It’s actually the end of the world that is far enough away.
Excited to listen to the album!
I understand what Friday’s Far Enough for Milk is about, but what does the title mean?
How can you know what the song is about without understanding the title?!
But to break artist convention and to just spell it out: “Friday’s Far Enough For Milk” is about living in a world where you are constantly asking yourself the question of what is still worth doing given that you think it’s quite plausible the end times are near. It becomes a habitual pattern to ask “is this thing still worth worrying about if it will only matter in a few years, or maybe even months?”.
As you stand in front of the milk for the supermarket, and you ask yourself “is it still worth worrying about whether this milk will go bad?” the answer becomes “well, I’ll probably have until Friday, and Friday is still good enough for milk to go bad” (and of course the romantic component of the song is that yes, this relationship is still worth caring about, because you definitely have until Friday, and Friday is long enough for this relationship to be worth it).
Ah, thanks! I didn’t understand that it meant ”...to go bad”.
Makes sense. And to be clear it’s not necessarily about “to go bad” just a general “to be worth thinking about”. It wouldn’t be an invalid interpretation to be like “Friday is far enough to think about whether this is too little milk, or whether I will run out of milk, or other random grocery related considerations”.
Friday’s far enough for milk to go bad, but it’s near enough for those other considerations.
This title bounces off my brain too, and I did some thinking about why.
The sentence “Friday’s far enough for milk” is obviously a shortened version of a longer sentence. There are a few ways the brain might try to fill in that longer sentence, and mine does something like this:
“Friday is far enough from now that buying milk is worth it”. This is weird: Does this imply that if Friday were closer to now, then buying milk wouldn’t be worth it anymore? The whole point is that milk is relevant on a Friday-like time scale, and Friday is close enough to now that buying milk is therefore worth it. So I think that this is where the primary confusion comes from: the most straightforward fill-in of the sentence (at least to my brain) leads to the opposite of its intended meaning.
The real sentence-extension goes like “Friday is far enough for humans to survive to make buying milk now worth it”. The whole “humans and surviving” part is crucial: if your brain doesn’t fill that part in immediately from context, then your reading of the sentence will be wrong. Friday is not the thing that is far enough away; It’s actually the end of the world that is far enough away.
Yeah, legit got chills from it