Lane Boy - Twenty One Pilots

"Don't trust a perfect person and don't trust a song that's flawless"

A perfect person has no seams. No bad timing. No old mistake they are still trying to understand. Every answer is polished, every story has an admirable ending, and somehow they have never had to apologize in a way that cost them anything. That is not necessarily goodness. Sometimes it is branding.

A flawless song can feel the same way. Every note lands exactly where it was designed to land. Every lyric has been sanded smooth. The production is so clean there is nowhere for a real person to sit down inside it. The song is not arguing for sloppiness. It is arguing for evidence of life.

The crack in someone's voice, the weird transition, the sentence that runs a little long because the thought did :) The admission that does not make them look particularly impressive. Those are not defects to be removed from the final product. They are often the only proof that there was a person in the room.

We are taught to trust polish because polish looks like competence. Sometimes it is competence. But sometimes it is camouflage. The best work still has fingerprints on it and the best people do too.

A little imperfection is not always a warning sign. Sometimes it is the signal that something is real.