The longest and most novelistic track on Glass Animals' 'How to Be a Human Being', 'The Other Side of Paradise' is a breakup letter to someone who became famous. Dave Bayley narrates the story of a love left behind in a bedsit while the beloved rockets to 'poolside riches' — and the corrosive magic of fame eats the person the narrator misses.

Fame as Vampirism

The song's imagery tracks a corruption arc: Versace girls, gold Camaros, 'camera lust', a boy gone 'stone cold crazy'. The chorus's farewell addresses the pre-fame self ('baby blue') as already dead — what returns from California is a ghost wearing him. 'Screamin' at the sun you blow into' compresses Icarus into seven words. The narrator's grief is doubly directed: at losing the person, and at watching him applaud his own transformation.

Psych-Funk Storytelling

Bayley's production is cinematic in miniature: a slinking bass groove, fly-wing synths, handclaps, and his falsetto doubling as both narrator and ghost. The verses swing with neo-soul syncopation; the chorus opens into widescreen reverb. The bridge — 'my thunder shook him down' — shifts the arrangement into storm texture, the narrator's own power entering the story just as it ends.

Concept-Album Function

On an album where each song is a character study drawn from strangers' stories told to the band, this one became the fan favorite for its generosity: the narrator never villainizes the star, only the machine. It remains a concert staple, its 'bye-bye baby blue' a communal goodbye to everyone's version of a person who left and changed.