Manic Street Preachers - Builder of Routines
Manic Street Preachers - Builder of Routines


Manic Street Preachers - Builder of Routines Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Rewind The Film
Released: 2013

Builder of Routines Lyrics


I've sealed myself in
Laminated all of my skin
Sellotaped my world in bits
I must embrace paralysis

Only in you do we see ourselves
Only in you can we see our end
So sick and so tired of being 4 real
Only the fiction still has the appeal

Builder of Routines
It makes me safe and clean
It crucifies parts of me
But never seems to make me bleed

Only in you do we see ourselves
Only in you can we imagine our mend
So sick and so tired of being 4 real
Only the fiction still has the appeal

How I hate middle age
In between acceptance and rage
Democracy has sure made a fool out of me
But I am the builder of routines

Writer/s: JAMES BRADFIELD, NICHOLAS JONES, SEAN MOORE
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Builder of Routines
  • Bassist Nicky Wire penned the song's lyrics by text message and texted them out to vocalist James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore. He was stuck back home in Wales looking after sick members of his family while his bandmates were recording at Berlin's Hansa studios. Wire explained to The Quietus : "My Dad was in hospital, and my wife was in hospital, the kids had norovirus and I was just mopping up sick and s--t, amazingly I didn't get ill but everyone else was so poorly. I've never been through so many Flash wipes and so much Domestos in my entire life. I was walking round in rubber gloves. It was proper Howard Hughes, I had face masks on and everything, but there you go."

    "Out of misery a flower blossomed," Wire continued. "We'd arranged this two week session in Hansa which I was so looking forward to, and everyone did get slightly better so I thought I might go for the last four days- and then I got snowed in. James said, 'Have you got anything going?' So I texted him that and within two days they'd done that track. I didn't even write it down on paper, which I've never done before."
  • Wire explained the song's meaning to The Quietus: "It's about crawling through the ship wreckage and still trying," he said, "I guess like a junkie will try and get some semblance of justification and routine, I'm always obsessed with how, in whatever situation I'm in, trying to invent that one bit of stability to keep it all together."
  • That's Sean Moore playing the flugelhorn (a kind of trumpet) solo. Wire commented to The Quietus, "It's very 'God Only Knows', something about it lifts the song out of the pit. Something about how you've been through all of that and now you're out."