Often times, what seems to happen, is that there are a bunch of people banging around through their days, slipping on banana peels, falling off of roofs, sleeping with the wrong people, crashing their cars, getting into arguments, feeling completely adrift, having their home broken into, coming down with a medical condition that defies reason or a cure, have had falling outs with one or both of their parents, have few people they can talk to, and the list goes on and on. Then, there are the people who try to help them out of the quicksand, the deluges and the quagmires. They are the calming influences - the few people that they have to turn to for help, if not something that resembles an answer.
Kevin Seconds, the legendary punk rock veteran who started and fronted 7 Seconds back in 1979 before going solo almost 20 years ago, seems like he has been both of these types of people. He's graduated to the listener, to the one looked to in a pinch, or in the throes of a complete meltdown. These folks come to Seconds and he takes their troubles in, processing them. He might not realize it at the time, but they're going to make up the parts of the characters that he'll insert into his songs later on, when he's dipped into that well again. The well is full of miscellany - over 50 years of anecdotes, mistakes, successes and words to the wise - that he's collected. They are the parts of him and pasts that remain current, all mixed together with whatever else people have given him to chew on. He sings, "I've got some secrets I keep buried in a box I still keep." These are the bits that he won't throw out. They are the coats of paint that stay stuck to the walls and no amount of scraping or power-washing is going to beat the clinginess out of them.
The people that we encounter on these four songs have their different levels of self-doubt clutching them, weighing them down. Seconds, or the narrator that we want to be him, questions why they're only seeing their dreams as faded and nothing else. He sings to them, "And I believe, when you were made, they threw in all the best/Assuming there's a they of them at all/And you deserve the brighter things/You are so pure and good/I'd get you to believe that if I could." It might be all that can be done in certain cases.