David Bazan’s approach to lyric writing is often to appropriate attitudes, functional approaches to life, or social or interpersonal behaviors which are almost always unarticulated, unacknowledged, or in many cases wholly or partially unknown to the person in whose consciousness they take up residence, and to literalize them into a first-person dramatic monologue of counterculturally brutal honesty. Here is one example, in which a husband (or possibly a wife) admits to his or her spouse that “I never wanted you /I never wanted to / Although I told you I did / In front of witnesses,” and concludes: “I know you never suspected / Because I never said / Baby, I was faking the whole time.”