Annotations for Muscle Museum

Lyric: Too little much too late
Annotation:
People will really only care about something if it is “too late”, normally if the band is broken up or the members are dead.

Lyric: But you still want to spoil it
 To prove I’ve made a big mistake
Annotation:
The addressee is trying to dissuade Matt from making music, saying it’s a “big mistake” to even bother trying, as he’ll never get anywhere.

Lyric: Can you see that I am needing
 Begging for so much more
 Than you could ever give?
Annotation:
Matt – or the character – is pleading with the audience to give him what he needs; their attention. He doesn’t want their adoration or their ignoration, but just their time, but no matter how much time he is given, it is never enough to satiate the desire to be noticed.

Lyric: Too long trying to resist it
 You’ve just gone and missed it
Annotation:
The people being spoken about here are trying to ignore their feelings about the band, whether it be Muse or a character band, and have procrastinated and ignored their feelings for so long that the band is now dead, either because of a lack of support or from time passing and thus an inevitable retirement, and now the band and their music has “escaped (their) world”.

Lyric: And I don’t want you to adore me
 Don’t want you to ignore me
 When it pleases you
 Yeah, and I’ll do it on my own
Annotation:
Here the concept is very clear: Muse don’t expect to be adored, they don’t care whether the people who listen to them like them or not. They just don’t want to be ignored, to be treated like some random guys that are playing, they just can’t stand the indifference of the spectators when they play. Anyway the thing doesn’t make them give up, “I’ll do it on my own”.

Lyric: She had something to confess to
 But you don’t have the time, so
 Look the other way
Annotation:
This song is about Muse’s early days: “she” is clearly the band, and in this lines Bellamy is talking to all the people that were there when they were playing but didn’t care about it. Muse had something to say, they believed in what they were doing, and in this lines is expressed all the anger against the people that “didn’t have the time” (which is ironic, means that they just didn’t care) to listen to them.

Lyric: You will wait until it’s over
 To reveal what you’d never shown her
Annotation:
Matt is appealing to all the people that the early days didn’t care about Muse but would have become fans after they reached success.

Lyric: [Outro]
Annotation:
The solo at the end sounds like a guitar solo, but it’s really a “vocal solo” that vocalist/guitarist Matt Bellamy sings. Matt explains more in a magazine article  (quote mirrored here): I wanted to do this big epic guitar solo at the end of the chorus and as soon as I started doing the solo, I missed a chord. So I suddenly found myself singing the guitar solo instead. I ended up singing it into a Marshall amp and it sounded exactly like guitar.

Lyric: I have played in every toilet
Annotation:
This is a reference to the “toilet circuit” of independent music venues. In Muse’s early days, they played a lot of gigs on the circuit, such as the Tunbridge Wells Forum  In another meaning, they also mean that they had performed in the mean places they should not have.

