Dentists, a magician’s assistant, a cowboy in New York and Michelle Pfeiffer, in that order, over a ukulele. The song holds the record for the longest unbroken run on the Australian singles chart, and its writer has never claimed the lines add up.
Here is where each image came from, what the riptide stands for, and why the video subtitles are deliberately wrong.
The Short Answer
It is about being young, anxious and in love with someone who is going somewhere you cannot follow. The riptide is the pull of that: something powerful, exciting and capable of taking her under. The individual images are drawn from unrelated places and were never designed to form one story.
The Story Behind the Song
Vance Joy is James Keogh, an Australian who played professional Australian rules football before switching to music. He began the song on guitar in 2008 and finished it in 2012 after picking up a ukulele, which supplied the melody that became the instrumental bridge and then the chorus.
Liberation Music released it on May 21, 2013 as the lead single from his debut EP God Loves You When You’re Dancing. It later appeared on his first album, Dream Your Life Away, in 2014. Keogh wrote it alone.
He has described part of it arriving on the walk back from a shop where he had gone to buy food for dinner, humming a melody that turned into the hook.
Where does the title come from?
Two places at once. A riptide is a current that pulls swimmers away from shore, which supplies the metaphor. It is also the name of a motel Keogh stayed at as a child, which is why the word was already lodged in his head.
He has said the ocean meaning is what he pictures, and that the motel is the reason the word had a private significance before it had a public one. Both are true and neither cancels the other.
Who is the magician’s assistant?
Somebody Keogh actually met. He has recounted asking a woman what she did and being told she was a magician’s assistant, and having no idea where to take the conversation from there.
The line survived because it does something no invented detail would. It is specific, slightly absurd and entirely unhelpful for understanding the song, which is exactly the register the whole lyric operates in.
Why Michelle Pfeiffer?
Because Keogh was taken with her as a child, particularly her performance as Catwoman in Batman Returns in 1992. The comparison is a compliment to the woman in the song, delivered by a narrator reaching for the highest-value reference he has.
It has had an odd afterlife. Two years later Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars opened “Uptown Funk” with a Michelle Pfeiffer reference of their own, which is enough of a coincidence that people still ask about it.
What is the movie he mentions?
The verse describes a man who quits his job and moves to New York, a cowboy running from himself. That points at Midnight Cowboy, the 1969 film in which Jon Voight plays a Texan who goes to Manhattan to reinvent himself and finds he has brought everything with him.
The reference does real work. The narrator is recommending a film about a person who fails to escape their own past, to a woman he suspects is about to leave for a bigger life.
Do the lyrics mean anything together?
Not in a way that resolves, and Keogh has never argued otherwise. The song is a run of images from childhood fear, jealousy, a chance meeting and a film, held together by a chorus about a woman moving toward something dangerous and a narrator asking whether she plans to stay.
The emotional line is completely clear even though the narrative one is not, which is a difficult thing to pull off and the main reason the song has outlasted the wave of ukulele pop it arrived with.
Why are the subtitles in the video wrong?
On purpose. Director Dimitri Basil, working with co-director Laura Gorun, chose to illustrate the song as literally as possible: a mouth full of dental equipment for the dentist line, dollar bills for the friends turning green. Basil has said that most videos avoid literalism, so he did the opposite, and that it worked because the lyrics are so absurd.
The onscreen text mishears the words in places, which is a joke about how everybody sings this song. The video was nominated for best video at the 2013 ARIA Awards.
How successful was it?
Number one on Triple J’s Hottest 100 for 2013, ahead of Lorde and Daft Punk, in a poll that drew about 1.49 million votes. Number six on the Australian singles chart, number ten in the UK, number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart.
It spent 120 consecutive weeks inside the Australian top 100, a national record, and took song of the year at the 2014 APRA Awards. Taylor Swift covered it for the BBC Live Lounge and later took Vance Joy on tour.
Why it lasted
Because it is easy to play and impossible to exhaust. Four chords on an instrument beginners buy first, and a lyric with enough unexplained detail that people are still arguing about the cowboy verse a decade later.
Songs learned from a friend’s ukulele rather than from a record are the ones people know entirely by ear; when you have the words and no title, our song lyrics search finds it.