Meaning is not fixed in the objects or forms we create; it resides in the living symbolic charge that animates them. A song, a ritual, a marriage vow, or a work of art may remain unchanged on the surface, yet its significance can shift, deepen, or hollow out entirely depending on how life unfolds. In this post, I explore two musical examples – Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One” and Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman” – to illustrate how external artifacts can persist while their internal symbolism evolves, and what this teaches us about the interior life of meaning itself.
This is a brief post about how the symbolic meaning of something can shift into its opposite even though the external trappings of the object remain the same.
I’ll use two examples of this phenomenon, both pulled from music.
I heard on the radio recently Shania Twain’s You’re Still the One, originally released in 1997. She wrote it about her then-husband and producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange where she celebrates the strength of their marriage. Lyrics included:
Looks like we made it
Look how far we’ve come my baby
We mighta took the long way
We knew we’d get there someday
They said, “I bet they’ll never make it”
But just look at us holding on
We’re still together, still going strong….Ain’t nothing better
We beat the odds together
I’m glad we didn’t listen
Look at what we would be missing…I’m so glad we made it
Look how far we’ve come my baby
The song was a triumph of optimism and love, a public declaration that they had beaten the odds. They made it! Here’s the music video:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KNZH-emehxA?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Well, what happened? On May 15, 2008, it was announced that they were separating after Lange had an affair with Twain’s best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Whoops.
Now, to be fair, this was almost a decade after Still the One came out; people evolve, they change, they get older, one can’t expect people to remain static. I certainly don’t. But the point is she made this song – which is one of her very most famous songs – about her husband, who then cheated on her with her best friend. The intrinsic meaning of the song has turned into a caricature of itself – instead of celebrating the strength of their marriage, the critics were ultimately proven correct, the marriage was proven to be hollow, and Twain looked like a fool both publicly and when she sang it. The point here is not to make fun of her, but to highlight that the external trappings of something, while they remain the same, may develop entirely different underlying meanings depending on how external developments affect them.
Twain understood this symbolic change, and so she updated her own understanding of the song: instead of it being about her and her life, now, she has contextualized it into being about what it means to her fans, how much the song resonates with them, and she sings it about her fans’ relationships within their own lives. “You get married because you think it’s going to last forever,” she revealed on TODAY in 2023. “So, the song no longer applied to me in that sense.” “You’re Still The One‘ is the favorite song I’ve ever written because it means so much to so many other people,” she explained. “That just really makes it the most important song I’ve ever written.” She remembers that it was initially hard to perform it after the divorce. “I was choking down the tears….[But] I soon realized that it wasn’t about me. People had adopted the song as their song,” she says, explaining that fans were thinking about their own relationships and lives in relation to the song. “This song has way surpassed why I wrote it. It’s so much more than that.”
Decently done, a partial (and necessary) recovery, but still perhaps kind of embarrassing – it’s hard to fully update its meaning given its history and context.
Another striking example of this phenomenon comes from Billy Joel with his great song She’s Always a Woman (1977). The song is here:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/D4nQB3V10i8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Joel wrote this about his then-wife when his friends and family told him she was extremely difficult, conniving, and manipulative, and he rejected their input. Yes, to him she could be nasty and difficult, but she still had a special place in his heart. A great and touching song, even though it highlights her negative attributes. A sample:
She is frequently kind
And she’s suddenly cruel
She can do as she pleases
She’s nobody’s fool
But she can’t be convicted
She’s earned her degree
And the most she will do
Is throw shadows at you
But she’s always a woman to me
Well, what happened? Joel was involved in some kind of motorcycle accident where he almost died, and when he was recovering in the hospital she came in and forced him to sign away some rights in his songs to her, utterly oblivious and uncaring about his health. They soon after divorced.
We can see the same thing happen here, then: developments in life inverted the meaning of the song. Joel was wrong in his initial intent, his critics were right, he was married to someone unusually difficult and uncaring, but his song was still popular among his fans! So what did he do? Perhaps more honestly than Twain, he would still perform it as fan service – although less so over time – but he felt totally emotionally disconnected from it: “This was a staple of Billy Joel’s concerts in the late ’70s, but when his marriage fell apart, he dropped it from the setlist, playing it only sporadically from 1980-2005. On one of his college tour shows, Billy said that it was about his first wife, who he didn’t really want to be singing about in the first place. He explained that while he was singing it, he would start thinking about what meal he would eat after the show. No passion whatsoever, so he dropped it.”
It wasn’t that it was too painful to sing; it was that the meaning no longer rang true. The lyrics were now a defense of someone he no longer believed deserved defending. So when he sang it later, it became mechanical – so mechanical that his own mind wandered to what meal he might eat after the show. The artistic-symbolic tether between intention and performance had been severed, leaving only empty form.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/fxDGqDCQ8YM?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Joel’s likely thinking about eating a sandwich here.
The intent of these two stories isn’t to pick on either Twain or Joel, but rather to highlight how meaning is a living, breathing thing; it is not static and it shifts over time; holding on to the original meaning of something after the symbol shifts invokes rigidity, inadaptability. The symbol lives only insofar as it continues to align with the lived experience it grew out of. That’s why Twain can still sing her song with conviction: she allows the symbol to migrate, to shed its biographical anchor and attach to the lives of her audience. The symbol survives by being handed over. Joel, on the other hand, experienced the opposite: the private symbolism collapsed, the “defense” encoded in the lyrics became a falsehood, and the symbol withered inside him. From the outside, both look like a musician singing an old hit; from the inside, one is carrying a living symbol, the other is mouthing an empty husk.
The deeper point here is that symbolic life is interior, not exterior. The audience usually sees only the artifact, but what matters for the soul is whether the symbol still breathes. If it dies, no amount of technical reproduction can resurrect it; if it lives, even corny lines can feel radiant.
Think of Heraclitus and his famous statement, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” We desperately want to think of certain things in our lives as safe, anchored and fixed forever, but this is impossible; everything is constantly in flux, constantly changing, and this is true for relationships, a marriage vow, politics, culture, habits, civilizations, even humanity’s relationship with the God image – it is true for everything. Every external form is only a vessel. The form can be repeated indefinitely, but the form itself is inert. What animates it is the inner current: the symbolic charge that links the form to lived experience, to soul, to meaning. That charge can deepen, shift, invert, or evaporate altogether depending on how life unfolds. A lyric once sung as devotion may later sound like a bitter joke; a ritual once performed mechanically may suddenly blaze with new intensity after tragedy or illumination. In this sense, symbols are alive – they grow or die within us. They are not dead emblems pointing to some static truth, but living intermediaries whose vitality depends on our own psychic development.
Most people notice only the external artifact – the polished performance, the wedding ring, the repeated prayer. They mistake persistence of form for persistence of meaning. But interiorly, what matters is whether the symbol is still inhabited. If the inner fire is gone, the form is a shell: a meal planned during a love song, a kiss exchanged without eros, a ritual recited with no inward assent. The essence is never in the vessel itself, but in the living resonance it carries. The husks remain long after the symbolic life inside them has fled. The true crisis is not the collapse of forms, but the exhaustion of the inner charge that once made them alive.
This is why it is so important to be multi-disciplinary about analysis, because truth is multi-faceted and can always be examined on multiple layers: what was the intent of the object when it was created? How was it received? How did its meaning evolve over time? What does it mean now? These meaning are often overlapping, contradictory, evolving over time; but truth, ultimately, is a higher level synthesis of every element, no matter how contradictory, and steel-manned to the strongest – and if it cannot be synthesized, it means we do not see with enough depth or perspective, something that may not always be synthesized fully on the material plane, only by God.
It “looks like we made it” – to the end of this post, thanks Shania. See you at the next.
Thanks for reading.
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