Trance Techno - Sound of Goodbye by Armin van Buuren - About depression and suicide??

One of the many techno tunes that I love to listen to repeatedly is Armin van Buuren's catchy and hip "Sound of Goodbye".

This is a pretty good approximation of what I look like
at one of the many "raves", "techno soirees" and "trance shindigs"
I attend.

Here is a youtube link to the so called "Tribal Feel Edit" of the song which has a very "trancey" feel but there are other versions of "Sound of Goodbye" out there to suit everyone's taste in techno.

Her Majesty prefers the "Dubstep" style. 

In the clip the vocals are performed by the Dutch trance icon Elles de Graaf . You'll also see the quite fetching Ms de Graaf running half naked across an isolated green valley towards a lake where at the end of the clip she appears to drown herself.

You get to see her bottom just before she dies!!

The lyrics are as follows. I've numbered each of the lines. She doesn't actually sing the numbers they're just there for reference purposes later.

     1. Every face I see is cold as ice

     2. Everything I touch is pain

     3. Ever since I lost imagination

     4. Like a stream that flows into the sea

     5. I am lost for all eternity

     6. Ever since you took your love away from me

     (Repeat lines 7 & 8 till the end of the song......)

     7. Sometimes the sound of goodbye

     8. Is louder than any drumbeat

The first two lines of the lyrics tell us that this poor damsel can't stand human contact any more and that everything is giving her pain. I think this describes the experience of extreme unipolar clinical depression poetically and precisely. The social withdrawal, the feeling that no one loves or cares for you, and that the only emotions you can experience are negative ones.

The third line talks about "lost imagination" being the trigger for her misery. Could it be some important relationship that she thought she had with someone that turned out to be imaginary, like a love that ended up not being reciprocated, or a friendship that wasn't as strong as she thought. One other possibility is that she has lost her faith in God. The God that she once thought was real but was actually only "imagination".

Depression can often be triggered by some kind of heartbreak or painful emotional event. I think this is what has sent the lovely Elles into her spiral of unhappiness.

I'll be your friend Elles! Come and stay at my house!

My wife won't mind. She can take the kids and go and live 

with her parents for a few weeks.

Lines 4 and 5 talk about how she feels like water from a stream that gets lost in the sea. That is, she thinks that her life doesn't matter and in the grand scheme of things she is insignificant and means nothing. Again this is the typical thought pattern of someone who is severely depressed.

Line 6 talks about the trigger for her illness again. "Ever since you took your love away from me". Again, I think this implies a failed relationship or a lost faith. The experience of rejection by person or God is, I believe, one of the worst things that a sensitive maiden such as Juffrouw de Graaf can endure and is something that could definitely be the spark for the psychological inferno of major depression.

"Juffrouw" is Dutch for "Missus". Google told me.

Now on to the "chorus". Lines 7 and 8 say that the sound of goodbye, which I think clearly refers to the act of killing yourself, is "Louder than any drumbeat".

The meaning of "drumbeat" here is pretty ambiguous. My first guess is that it might be a metaphor for her heartbeat which is in turn a symbol for her being alive. If this is what it's saying then the chorus means that she thinks that her suicide is more significant and matters more (louder) than her life.

The other alternative revolves around the idea that beating drums were used as a form of communication in some ancient cultures. Is she saying that she's tried to communicate with others about her pain and distress but that no one has listened, but that by drowning herself she'll finally get others to pay attention?

Ancient cultures also used smoke signals to communicate but

everyone thought "drumbeat" sounded cooler.

After all that detailed analysis I think it's quite reasonable and safe to assume that this song is indeed about the thoughts and emotions of a depressed woman who is going to die by her own hand. 

At this point in the post I think I'm supposed to appeal to anyone with depression or thoughts about suicide to contact a doctor or psychiatrist or something. Especially if you're an attractive techno princess with the voice of an angel.

 Just take some Prozac and get some shock treatment and

you'll be fine.