Regina Spektor - "The Calculation"

Regina Spektor is one of the best lyricists of our generation. All of her songs are incredibly complex and poetic, but my favorite of her songs (lyrically) is The Calculation. (Lyrics here)

The song is about people forcing love, and forcing relationships, just because it seems like they should be there, for whatever reason - because they seem like they should be perfect for each other, or because everyone thinks they should be together.

So we made our own computer
Out of macaroni pieces
And it did our thinking
While we lived our lives
It counted up our feelings
And divided them up even
And it called our calculation
Perfect love

This part of the song is about them going through life mindlessly, letting factors determine things that emotions should be deciding. The "computer" in the song is talking about these formulas that we've created in our society. X plus Y equals perfect relationship.

So we made the hard decision
And we each made an incision
Past our muscles and our bones
Saw our hearts were little stones
Pulled 'em out they weren't beating
And we weren't even bleeding
As we lay them on our granite counter top

Their hearts have been so hardened by the pressure of the calculations that they hardly feel human anymore. By portraying this usually gory imagery of cutting and taking hearts out and baring them as being sterile and dry emphasizes how sterile and dry these people have become. They're baring their hearts to each other and it seems almost sterile.

We beat 'em up against each other
We beat 'em up against each other
We struck 'em hard against each other
We struck 'em so hard, so hard 'til they sparked

By banging their rock hearts against each other to make a spark, they are forcing themselves to love one another by just shoving themselves together again and again.