Silent Planet | Vanity of Sleep | Track-By-Track Analysis

Garrett talks with us about the meaning behind "Vanity of Sleep"

This is a love affair with consumer despair (1), an emptiness I can call my own… (2) an arbitrary sanctuary (3) where we deposit prayers to a dispensable God. (4)

Welcome to the end stage age (5) where joy is a pill and love’s a prescription. Vaccinated with an outward suspicion, isolation became our pre-existing condition. (6) Manifested drudge of my mass-manufactured consent… (7) but there’s a gaping hole in my consciousness: A deep that cries out to deep. (8)

This is a love affair with consumer despair, an emptiness I can call my own: An antidote for mystery, our indifference is deafening.

.אהיה אשר אהיה
(9)

There’s a presence here (10)… It stirs inside the static dissonance of discontent that refused to relent. I built a home overlooking a graveyard (to remind myself I’m still alive.) Yet you see a flaw still abides as I witness an ending that I can’t contrive. We watched a golden array of a casket parade as wealth makes it’s final display to the ground. I found it strange that even in this place death became such a gainful exchange.

Give me something to hold, give me something that bleeds. I’ll scour the earth for my identity. (11) Is there a cure for a sick society? (12)

So rich in this world, so in debt to ourselves. The network of life in such a disconnect. (13) How many times must we die this death?

Annihilation is all we are.

Desolation is everything I know.

All we are is all we love (14) and everything I know is destructible. Artificial heart, obsidian soul: Encircled by dreams that are combustible. (15) We trade the Garden for Cities (16), the Tree for a Tower (17) - surrendered our faith, became addicted to power. I know that hope grows inside of the Wound (18) and I know progress is empty (19) I must Be Consumed (20). So I’ll dig through these masks ’til I find my face; separate from the false pretense I embraced. (21) It kills me to know that you’ll never find peace. You can have all the world but you’ll never be free. (22)

Tear the stitches sewn across my existence. Cut me out from this nothingness.
Dusk will come and lay to rest our fleeting, fading, silhouettes. (23)


1. Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy
2. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
3. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
4. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
5. Strauss–Howe generational theory
6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
7. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
8. Psalm 42:7
9. Exodus 3:14
10. Many Rooms, “There is a Presence Here”
11. Nita Mathur, Consumer Culture, Modernity, and Identity
12. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society
13. Sam Esmail, Mr. Robot
14. Concept of Homo Liturgicus by James K. A. Smith
15. Matthew 6:19-20
16. Genesis 3:23
17. Genesis 11:1-9
18. Inhabit the Wound (2016)
19. Jason Scribner
20. Dying in Circles (2016)
21. Martin Buber, I and Thou
22. Mark 8:36
23. Ecclesiastes 1:3-5