The World of Pablo - First Album

The first album of the stories from The World of Pablo is based on the songs from I Was So Unpopular In School and Now They're Giving Me This Beautiful Bicycle.

Summary
The story begins with the near death of the unnamed main character's mother, a conservative woman which wants her son to have a normal, predictable life. He moves in to a new city with his boyfriend, and he finds a lot of his friends there, including a girl called Lilly who he used to hang out with and be very fond of. They lost touch once she moved away to that very city he's just new to.

The character starts growing feelings for Lilly and one night, at a late night party at a friend's house, they get together. They start dating and she becomes his hope of a normal and stable life he's struggled to find inspiring. He would do things to impress her as he would try to be her perfect boyfriend. At the same time, he has problems with his catholic sister, who stresses him. He starts feeling uneasy with the whole of his life, and he ends up doing things Lilly didn't like. As the relationship gets more awkward, they try to get counselling from Dr. Phil. The character says he is not as good as Lilly, but says he needs her beside him so he can be a better person for her. Lilly decides to break up with the character and fly away from the city. Pablo drowns in sorrow as he doesn't understand what happened, thinking he dind't get a "fair farewell" from Lilly.

Story
Pablo Diablo (although his name is not mentioned in this album) visits his mother after she had a heart attack. She says she will stop working in a charity organisation she started, and in turn will invest in casino stocks, which includes buying some for her own children. In the conversation they have she shows herself as judgemental and asks her son when he is going to have children, which prompts a discussion and makes Pablo go away. Pablo digresses on how normalization made him a dogmatic, dull person, who he was not before ("And I stopped thinking that things can be both black and white.") and who he doesn't want to be, since it is, for him, a "ticking bomb".

Pablo decides to move away with his boyfriend and start a new life. He goes to the city, a place where many friends of his already live in. He gets a cleaning job, with free afternoons, and reunites with his friends. After getting together him them, though, Pablo gets closer to his old friend Lilly, of whom he has fond memories. One night he sleeps over a friend's house and gets together with Lilly.

They start dating, and Pablo's previous relationship is over. Pablo does lots of things to impress Lilly, as he "couldn't afford" the tickets he bought to go out with her, Freddie and Emma. In a conversation about the future, Freddie says he wants to be a teacher, while Emma and Lilly say they want to change the world. Susan Lee, Pablo's sister, comes to the city to bother him about Christianity, although Pablo points out she is profitting from the casino stocks their mom bought them.

It doesn't take long, though, for Pablo to hurt Lilly by spying on her. He explains that the reason he's done it is that he is not used to being in a relationship, and that he's been away from her for far too much time to simply trust her. While he admits that he's done wrong, he also points the finger at her. He asks not to be mocked on by his inexperience with caring and affection, and asks for help.

The story proceeds but they keep drifting apart. Pablo carries on trying to be the boyfriend he thinks Lilly wants him to be, but he fails; at the same time, he keeps trying to make this normal life he's living the one he wants. He gets more and more stressed as Susan keeps bugging him, and he and Lilly decide to go to Dr. Phil for professional help. Dr. Phil says Pablo should "choose his conflicts", but he doesn't say anything. Pablo ultimately tells Lilly she should choose her conflicts, as he needs her beside him to make the relationship work. They have an argument and Pablo sees his carefully crafted world falling apart, trying to deny it by listening to loud music.

Lilly breaks up with him, and she embarks on an airplane. Pablo is sad, and he doesn't understand why she didn't choose to help him overcome his troubles. Lilly didn't do so because he's naive: he's naive for thinking he can overcome his will for an life of adventure by settling down without experiencing the life he craves. His naivety, though, is precisely the reason why she loves him, she thinks to herself. He is angry and in grief, for he considers he didn't have a fair goodbye, saying that he thought he "could ask for more from" her.

Track list
The track list from the album, rearranged to mirror the order from the story, is:


 * 1) Good and Bad
 * 2) City
 * 3) Do You Remember
 * 4) Stay Awake
 * 5) Nobel Square
 * 6) Apologize
 * 7) No One Knows You
 * 8) Jackass
 * 9) Want To Cannot Help But Dance
 * 10) Summercat
 * 11) Ask For More

Building the Story
The starting track from the album is the one in which Lilly is saying goodbye to Pablo, breaking up with him. It is near the end of the story. Had it really started the story instead, the contents of the other songs would have been different. All the songs about arguments (Jackass, Apologize, even Want to Cannot Help) could be interpreted as missteps on the way to a happy ending, symbolized by No One Knows You.

There are two good arguments against this point of view, one intrinsec and the other one external. The first argument is that No One Knows You is not, in fact, a happy song. It is quite the contrary. The way Pablo talks endlessly and, differently from other songs, without replies, means that Lilly is not talking back (or barely doing it, as he at least gets to know that she dreamed about Janet and Jane), and the repetition in the chorus serves its role of trying to make real what is mostly not; it represents wishful thinking, just like Pablo's mother (and Pablo himself) has done in Good and Bad. It is a song of awkwardness in the relationship.

Besides, the second album is entirely comprised of sad songs when concerning Lilly and Pablo; they are not together in any of the songs. The only explanation for that would be that the whole second album is a flashback, but the point of the first one is that Pablo wants something that he's always felt, but has never had (for a long period of time; he's had a little of that before in Swedish Sin), so all he does in the second album has to come after Lilly abandoned him to give him the chance (and the push) to do precisely that, in the hopes that he grows out of it and genuinely wants to be with her, embracing that choice of life without looking back. That this is what is at stakes is shown by subsequent albums rather than in the first one, necessarily.

After it is determined that Summercat is at the end of the story, Ask For More can be easily identified as Pablo's grief for what happened, as he is left thinking that he, despite his best intentions, couldn't be good enough for Lilly. The decision Lilly has taken had to be taken after a last situation on a series of bad ones; we are presented with the three songs about arguments exposed above, and they were ordered from the least serious to the most serious one. Want to Cannot Help can be seen as the most serious because Pablo says that "words can't save" him, that "it's too late" for anything and that the tears appear, tearing him apart. Jackass can be seen as the middle one as it includes the word "mercy", which is pretty strong, and in it Pablo fully blames himself (in Apologize he tries to shift the focus of the conversation for a while, blaming Lilly for something she might have also done). No One Knows You can be put in between these discussions as a depicturing of the sad state of affairs of the relationship.

But before things go awry they have to have had a beginning: City, Do You Remember, Stay Awake and Nobel Square, in this order, provide a storyline for their relationship, as well as a backstory for Pablo, Lilly and some minor characters. Nobel Square has to have happened after Pablo had moved in to the city, as in the song he is trying to make that city "his". Finally, there's Good and Bad, which can account for a reason why Pablo moved to the city in the first place, even though it can be scraped out of the story completely with no greater damage to it.

Discussion and Alternative Theories

 * 1) It is possible that Pablo's mother didn't have a heart attack at all, as people usually generalize lots of similar sudden illnesses as "heart attacks". The imprecise way in which Pablo talks about the situation testifies to that.
 * 2) This doesn't necessarily mean that they had a fight, but the nature of the question (a negative one) can as well imply it.
 * 3) The whole song Do You Remember can be interpreted as being sung from the perspective of Lilly. Her fascination with the reunion of all Pablo's friends (who probably were mutual and long-dated, considering songs such as Stay Awake) doesn't make a lot of sense, however, as she had been living in the city for way more time than Pablo, who just moved in.
 * 4) These memories might not have been about Lilly at all, though the hypothesis that they are make the perfect bridge from "friends' reunion" to "getting together", which happens in Stay Awake.
 * 5) It is not certain that it was a friend's house, but the fact that Pablo was still dating at the time makes it a little more improbable that it was, for instance, his house.
 * 6) The song may have been sung from the perspective of Lilly, but that is highly improbable considering the rest of the song, which is much more befitting to Pablo's personality.
 * 7) It may be that Dr. Phil told Lilly to choose her conflicts, but by telling Pablo (and the later developments in the song) the story implies that at some point Pablo will choose his conflicts by choosing to tell Lilly about his struggle with normalization, which is critical to the unfolding of the story.