"Behind every tree there's a new monster"
About this Quote
Paranoia has rarely sounded so singable. "Behind every tree there's a new monster" takes a childlike setup - the innocent, storybook forest - and flips it into a worldview where danger is not an interruption but the default setting. Rundgren’s line works because it’s vivid and portable: you can see the tree line, feel the pause before you step forward, then get hit with the punch that the threat is endless, freshly generated, always waiting just out of sight.
The intent isn’t to name a specific monster; it’s to describe a mental habit. The "new" matters as much as the "monster". This isn’t fear of one known enemy you can learn and defeat. It’s the exhausting modern condition of cycling anxieties: yesterday’s panic is replaced by today’s. In that sense, the lyric reads like an early map of our doomscrolling era, where the feed refreshes and another crisis emerges from the foliage.
As a musician who moved easily between psychedelia, pop craftsmanship, and self-aware commentary, Rundgren often treats perception as the real battleground. The subtext here is that the forest is ordinary life - media, relationships, politics, even the self - and the monsters are projections amplified by attention. Turn your head, and the world supplies another reason to brace. The line lands because it’s both spooky and accusatory: yes, the monsters might be real, but the machine that keeps inventing them is also you.
The intent isn’t to name a specific monster; it’s to describe a mental habit. The "new" matters as much as the "monster". This isn’t fear of one known enemy you can learn and defeat. It’s the exhausting modern condition of cycling anxieties: yesterday’s panic is replaced by today’s. In that sense, the lyric reads like an early map of our doomscrolling era, where the feed refreshes and another crisis emerges from the foliage.
As a musician who moved easily between psychedelia, pop craftsmanship, and self-aware commentary, Rundgren often treats perception as the real battleground. The subtext here is that the forest is ordinary life - media, relationships, politics, even the self - and the monsters are projections amplified by attention. Turn your head, and the world supplies another reason to brace. The line lands because it’s both spooky and accusatory: yes, the monsters might be real, but the machine that keeps inventing them is also you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
|---|
More Quotes by Todd
Add to List
