Interpretations:I'm Your Boyfriend Now

I think this one is pretty obvious. It's about a celebrity stalker. The narrator is obsessed with a celebrity and has gone so far as to track her down and stand outside her house.

In a way, it reminds me of the Monkees' "Star Collector", which is about hangers-on, only it takes the extra step into obsession. It sounds upbeat but is actually kind of creepy. "You have to admit that I'm you boyfriend now" could be taken as a sort of demand or threat.

Oddly straightforward for TMBG, but I like the contradiction between the sound of the song and the content.

~ Sam

I don't think it's necessarily a celebrity being stalked, personally. To me, the song's just about a guy who's stalking someone (probably someone he knew already). I always interpreted "(her) book" as being a phone book--he looks up her number in the phone book, and finally manages to trace it to her house. I honestly never considered the possibility of the stalkee being a celebrity. ~Anna Ng hears your words. 18:09, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the above interpretation and raise that it might be about something that might have happened to Sarah Vowell. It talks about how the world thinks the person being stalked is "strange" and how he read her book (Sarah Vowell being an author). She's also a good friend of the band. -Lars

First off, we all agree that "Leave a Mess" is a pun, and if it weren't, it would be "Pleas leave a mess...", right? And dropping the receiver is just saying he got nervous. And this isn;t Sarah Vowell, it's just adding to the strangeness that he read her book to find where she lived. --Dunklekuh81

This is the cop out version. By removing the "restraining order line" which was in the original demo, this version retreats into ambiguity when it used to really bite. Mr Tuck

awww.... John's in love!! Nerdy4every95

No interpretation, just a visualization...

... of what one moment would look like in my experimental film of the music video for this song, during the lyrics "Your boyfriend likes Italian food and wine..." We would see (if this video existed) a messy tabletop covered with the sort of creepy dreck a stalker like this would own (use your imagination), and then THUMP THUMP down on the table would plop an open can of Generic Spaghetti and Meatballs, two forks sticking out of it, and a big jug of cheap wine with two straws! -- Watt deFalk