My Trip to "Paris"

JTK Explains the Metaphorical Meaning Behind the Single

It was fun! As cliché, mundane, and corny as that statement sounds, it is, but a truth. Well, you can argue that anything is true depending on the angle, and as truth is opinionated, for someone else, my experience in Paris could be different, or I might just be lying to myself. 

As a young boy, I remember chatting with my siblings making jokes about how my Dad could just never let anything go or waste. By “anything”, I mean material possessions like TVs, Cell phones, clothes, computers, alarm clocks, name it. Whatever he owned was his. It didn’t matter what it was, how old it was, or how much it’d served him. If anything in the house developed a fault, he would always want to get it fixed, by himself or however. For some reason, I had a different mentality. I was supposed to be picking up from him, but I was being influenced by something else that I wasn’t exactly sure of at that time. I would often think to myself “Just get a new one. Now comes a dilemma, what is the right way to do things? I could argue till my beard reached my chest that it’s better off to get something new than waste effort trying to fix it.

That then makes me think that does anything really mean or matter much to the modern man? Do we really love anything dearly? What has happened to our fighting spirit? Why do we give up on everything so easily? Questions, questions, questions. By observation, it’s simply conditioning. I live in a world where it’s more expensive to fix my torn pants than to get a new one. The choice becomes easier. I could go on forever, but one sad reality is that this mentality of “On to the next” has eaten up into almost every area of people’s lives, and I’m guilty as well. The saddest reality is its impact on our relationships with people, regardless of the type – Romantic, business, platonic friendship, or even with family. I have learned that people let things go too easily nowadays, give less and less benefit of doubt to others, fail to fight for what they want or is theirs, and altogether have a certain sense of entitlement to whatever they like/want, and I find this to be very bizarre. That, is my primary inspiration for remaking Paris. I can only understand so much from the perspective of The Chainsmokers, who are the original owners, but for me this is what the song is about, at least for my own version.

I decided to take song, and make it my own. I switched it up sonically and showed what it would have sounded like if I wrote it. Part of the lyrics says “If we go down, then we go down together”, that’s the type of mentality I want to have, and that’s why it resonates strongly in my head, but still every day, I feel like a tiny bit of my values is cut out, and I’m slowly blending it with the crowd, sadly. 

According to The Chainsmokers, Paris follows the metaphorical and literal journey of a millennial relationship; through youth and naivety, heartbreak and mistakes, the two remain together, determined to endure the ‘ride’ and the hardships that come with it. I’ve never been in Paris, but I hope to someday. However, a place where I find peace, security, solace, comfort, and where I am most willing to put in work, and do everything to provide those things for another person, that is my Paris.