Song Meaning
The song was inspired by the 1980s song "People Who Died," by The Jim Carroll Band, an emotional salute to the casualties of New York drug culture written by poet and singer Jim Carroll, who also wrote the autobiographical The Basketball Diaries. As Chris Cornell explained: "It's a bunch of references to people that I knew that ... were younger than me who've been dead for years and years, up to a couple of years ago."it is also about people who killed themselves before their time has come."
The lyrics also make a reference to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. ("...I've seen fifty-thousand names all engraved on a stone..."). As Cornell has put it: "And then just kind of that juxtaposition of, even though it seems a lot for one person, a young healthy person, to have lost all these friends through various means of stupidity and other things, then making reference to the Vietnam War Memorial and the sheer numbers of dead. And remembering that and pointing out that each one of them has a family, each one of them has friends that are sitting around thinking about the same stuff that I did. But the numbers are astounding and, in a sense, kind of criminal. And that's what the song's about."
Read more about this topic: Your Time Has Come
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