# Life Is Good > **One-line reading.** Joy as a *decision*, not a description — the speaker sees the flames, the lies, the fighting and his own sadness, and chooses *"life is good"* anyway, because the world stays worth loving even when it isn't. > [!info] Single & credits > **Standalone single** — angelbaby & Jagwar Twin, 2023 · not on an album, no track number > **Written by** Dallas Caton · Jay Stolar · Jordan Palmer · Brandyn Burnette · **Josh Dun** · Luke Villegas · Roy English > **Produced by** angelbaby · Jay Stolar · Jordan Palmer — **Vocals** angelbaby (with Jagwar Twin) · **Mixed by** Jeff Ellis · **Mastered by** Dale Becker > **Tuning** 444 Hz *(Roy: every Jagwar Twin song is tuned to it — "a healing frequency")* > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com/artists/Jagwar-twin) · [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/track/6Y0j8yUF3rPSTrTtVEsCNh) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Visualizer (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9vm_C3tZYA) A nursery rhyme about the end of the world. That's the whole trick of it: a bright, three-minute sing-along that cheerfully reports the house is on fire and shrugs *"but at least we're having fun"* — and means both halves. It's the catalogue's forced-positivity thread caught in the act of growing up. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — standalone single, early November 2023; Jagwar Twin's collaboration with **angelbaby**, an AI/virtual artist. It arrived first as a limited Web3 drop on **Sound.xyz** (a 0.01-ETH edition), then everywhere on DSPs days later. Toured heavily through 2024 into 2025 (Slovakia, May 2024; Brussels, June 2024; Dubai, December 2024), often with angelbaby credited as the on-screen "sound." - **In one line** — the smile you choose *against* the flames, held so deliberately you can't quite tell if it's wisdom or evasion — and the song won't tell you which. - **Who speaks** — [[Roy|Jagwar Twin]] as the bright-surfaced bard *and* the one confessing underneath, co-voiced by an AI. Addressed to the crowd — "kids" gathered for a song. - **Key symbols** — the [[Concepts/The Voice|antenna]] (the mind as receiver) · the smile · the [[Fire|flames]] · the circle 'round the sun · the [[The Veil — The Deep End|illusion]] / plastic reality. ## The song, mapped The form *is* the argument: a boast, repeatedly punctured by a confession, ending on a refusal to choose. It's short by design — *"and it won't be very long"* — built from only two real verse-ideas and a heavily repeated chorus, exactly the way a children's song is built. And that's not an accident of taste. Roy has a name for it: **"Trojan Horse music."** In a 2024 interview he traces the method to an early mentor, producer Jeff Bhasker, who *"made me study 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,' study nursery rhymes, and study why they're the most genius songs of all time"* — the idea being that the simplest songs are secretly the most complex, *"like Einstein's E=mc²."* The bright, singable chorus works *"like a mantra"*; the dark cargo rides in underneath it. Life Is Good is that technique caught in the open — a nursery rhyme deliberately loaded with the end of the world. Following its own moves: | Section | In the song | What it does | |---|---|---| | **Hook-seed** | *"Life is good / I'm great"* | The thesis stated bare, before the chorus fully lands. | | **Chorus** *(the engine)* | *"…Another circle 'round the sun / The world's in flames / but at least we're having fun"* | The decision. Good *despite* the fire, not *because* of fortune. "Another circle 'round the sun" = a year turning — cyclical time, the [[The Loop and the Circle|LOOP]]'s recurrence. Recurs 3+ times, sometimes flipping to *"I'm good / I'm great."* | | **Bard verse** | *"Hey kids I'll sing you a song / and it won't be very long… Some people tell me I'm strange / but I like living this way"* | Speaker-as-storyteller, plus a flash of self-acceptance. The song announces *itself* as a song sung to children while the world burns. | | **The "ah ah ah"** | *(wordless)* | The mantra hook — the sing-along machine made audible. Try not to catch yourself humming it. | | **Boast → break** | *"La viva es buena / my life is great / my head's an antenna / I'm wide awake"* → *"…but I'm mad / and I'm sad / and I'm misunderstood"* | The core juxtaposition in miniature: a grand Spanish flourish, then the same phrasing deflated into a sulky plain-English confession. | | **Chorus ×2** | *"Life is good…"* then the *"I'm good…"* variant | The party reasserts itself, back to back. | | **Dissociation verse** | *"Face down but I can feel my body moving / is this real or am I in an illusion / get up get up I'm only human / pupils dilated like I'm 'bout to lose it / so crazy so I turn off the news… every one fighting, tell me which side are you / keep a smile on my face, too happy to choose"* | Eight lines, sung straight through with **no chorus to break the fall** — overwhelm → media-withdrawal → the closing **refusal**. This is the song's real weather. | | **Outro** | chorus ×2, then *"but at least we're having fun"* ×3 to fade | It ends on the *consolation*, not the resolution. The last word is *"at least"* — structurally refusing to settle the wisdom-vs-evasion question. | A note on two lines people mishear. *"La viva es buena"* is the actual sung lyric (not a slip for *"la vida es buena"*), and it's **"Another** circle 'round the sun," apostrophe-round — both confirmed against the released recording. If you've seen this song written up with a *"Nether circle round the sun"* underworld cosmology, that was a transcription error; the real line points at the loop, not the underworld. ## What it means The chorus is **joy as a decision, not a verdict on the evidence.** Everything hangs on that structure. It's good *despite* the flames — a choice re-made every time the line comes back around, which is why the song can hold *"the world's in flames"* and *"at least we're having fun"* in the same breath without flinching. That makes it a genuine step forward from [[Happy Face]], not a repeat. Happy Face wears the smile as pure disguise — a mask over the ache. Life Is Good *names the ache* — *"I'm mad / I'm sad / I'm misunderstood"* — **and still chooses "life is good" anyway.** That's polarity-holding, both true at once, not anesthesia. You are not in denial if you can say the pain out loud. The forced-positivity thread has learned to keep its eyes open. But it doesn't get to feel clean about it, and this is the load-bearing tension the song refuses to resolve. *"Keep a smile on my face, too happy to choose"* reads two ways at once: - **Defiance.** Refusing to let the outrage-machine — *"which side are you"* — eat your humanity. You stay *"only human,"* you love the world even as it burns, precisely so the fire doesn't win. - **Complicity.** Fun-over-truth dissociation — *"turn off the news"* — the dumbing-down that [[Welcome to the Circus]] runs on. Grinning your way out of every hard question. The *"I'm mad and I'm sad"* admission tips it toward defiance — again, naming the pain is the tell that you're not asleep. But the dissociation imagery keeps complicity alive: face-down, *"pupils dilated like I'm 'bout to lose it,"* a body that moves on its own while the mind asks *"is this real."* **The smile being either wisdom or evasion is the song.** Don't resolve it; the ambiguity is the content. Two more threads run underneath. The speaker is **overwhelmed by awareness, not asleep to it** — *"my head's an antenna / I'm wide awake,"* a mind tuned to receive everything at once (culture, fear, the collective anxiety), *too* awake, and the smile is partly a way to survive the reception. And the delivery is **the Trojan-Horse device made self-aware**: the same bright coating that lets [[Not Your Homie]] and [[dumbledore]] smuggle dark cargo, except here the song *knows* it's doing it and says so out loud — *"I'll sing you a song."* The deepest kinship in the catalogue is with **[[tomorrow (ANGLE OF ETERNITY)]]**. Both songs refuse certainty and ideological possession and choose presence and humanity instead — from opposite tempers. *tomorrow* does it in a spiritual register: *"maybe I don't know, and that's fine with me."* Life Is Good does it playfully: *"living in a lie… too happy to choose."* Same underlying question, asked twice: **how do you stay human when the world is overwhelming?** ## Characters - [[Roy|Jagwar Twin]] — the bard and ringmaster of the bright surface, and the one confessing underneath it; the storyteller who sings you a song while the world's in flames. - **angelbaby** *(@angelbaby / angelbaby3045.eth)* — the credited AI/virtual collaborator, publicly billed as co-artist, producer and vocalist. A "metastar" from the Web3 entertainment company Hume (CAA-signed; known for AI-voice work, including a track using Grimes' AI-generated voice), presented as a leopard-patterned rabbit with a septum piercing, styled in lowercase. A real external collaborator — Roy refers to the persona as "he." Chronologically, angelbaby is the **earliest node in Roy's documented AI / digital-double thread**, predating the "made by AI" [[Bounce]]-era visualizer work and everything after. See [[Concepts/The Digital Double]]. - **The "kids" / the crowd** — addressed directly (*"Hey kids I'll sing you a song"*): the audience being entertained while the world burns. See [[The Crowd]]. - **Josh Dun** *(Twenty One Pilots)* — a credited co-writer. Behind the glass rather than a character in the song, but a notable name given how often Jagwar Twin gets compared to Twenty One Pilots. ## Symbols - **The [[Concepts/The Voice|antenna]]** — *"my head's an antenna / I'm wide awake"*; the mind tuned to signal, receiving everything. The posture of being *too* connected to the collective feed. - **The smile** — joy held as a *chosen* posture against the flames; the load-bearing ambiguity, defiance or evasion, deliberately unresolved. - **The [[Fire|flames]]** — *"the world's in flames"*; the burning world the joy is chosen against, the apocalyptic backdrop it shares with [[All My Friends]]. The line became its own social shorthand — Jagwar Twin kept re-posting *"the world's in flames 🐇"* clips (the rabbit emoji tying the chorus into the wider rabbit iconography) long after release. - **The circle 'round the sun** — a year turning, cyclical time; the corrected *"Another"* points it at [[Concepts/The Loop and the Circle|LOOP]]'s mechanical recurrence — another lap, same track. - **The [[The Veil — The Deep End|illusion]] / plastic reality** — *"is this real or am I in an illusion" / "living in a lie and we can't see the truth"*; the fake-reality and media cluster, quietly sharpened by *who* is co-singing it. - **The body-that-moves-on-its-own** — *"face down but I can feel my body moving"*; kinetic dissociation, the mind detached from the moving body (the [[Bounce]] image). - **The news, turned off** — *"so I turn off the news"*; media-withdrawal as a survival move against the overload. ## Connected songs - [[Happy Face]] — the forced-positivity thread. Life Is Good is the **more integrated step**: Happy Face's smile is pure disguise; Life Is Good admits the sadness and *still* chooses joy. Roy pairs the two himself, and names Happy Face as *the* worked example of the Trojan-Horse method — even gating its 2019 release behind a facial-recognition site (deathofmygeneration.fun) that made you *hold a smile* through dystopian imagery for the song's whole length before it hit DSPs. - [[tomorrow (ANGLE OF ETERNITY)]] — the **deepest kinship**: both refuse certainty and choose presence and humanity, from different tones. *"That's fine with me"* against *"too happy to choose."* - [[All My Friends]] — the **2023 sibling** (roughly six months earlier): two songs that meet the world's end with *chosen togetherness*, both carrying the same beautiful-and-unsettling double-edge (chosen love, or acceptance of the going-down). - [[Bounce]] — the body-moving-while-mind-elsewhere image. In Bounce the motion *avoids* knowing; here the body moves while the mind *questions* reality. - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — the trap the song survives *inside*, or is complicit *with*: the fun-over-truth machine. - [[Good Day]] — major-key brightness stretched over instability; the same surface-vs-substrate kinship. - [[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)]] — angelbaby's press framing, *"we can't pretend that everything is just perfect,"* rhymes almost exactly with Bad Feeling's *"everything's perfect here"* (and the two singles rolled out weeks apart). - [[Concepts/Duality]] — joy and sadness held as a polarity, both true at once; the song files cleanly as a Duality instance. - [[Concepts/The Digital Double]] — the AI-collaborator lineage that angelbaby opens. - [[Not Your Homie]] · [[dumbledore]] — fellow sweet-surface-over-darkness devices. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the antenna, the smile, and the Hermetic frame *(tap to open)* > Roy's public toolkit includes the Hermetic principles (they're transcribed on his "I'm 33" board — see [[Concepts/The I'm 33 Board]] and [[Concepts/The Sacred Truths/Hermeticism - As Above So Below]]), and two of them map onto this song's core images with unusual precision. > > **The antenna as the Vibration principle.** *"My head's an antenna / I'm wide awake"* is the posture of the Kybalion's Vibration principle as Roy has framed it — *"tune to desired frequency,"* *"the mind lives within a sea of information"* — and as he put it publicly in 2020: *"everything is a vibrational frequency. Light, matter, sound, it's all the same thing at variable speeds."* Three public anchors (the board cell, the 2020 quote, the lyric) lift this past coincidence into engagement — though the specific line-to-doctrine match is still a reader's mapping, not something Roy stated as intent. It reframes the antenna: the mind isn't just anxious, it's *tuned* — receiving a frequency it can't switch off. > > **"Too happy to choose" as the Polarity principle.** In the board's frame the smile that won't pick a side enacts Polarity — *"all truths are but half-truths," "extremes meet," "change the vibrations of hate into the vibrations of love."* Read this way, the refusal isn't mere avoidance; it's holding the warring sides as **two degrees of one thing**. That *sharpens* the tension rather than dissolving it: it hands the defiance reading a doctrine to stand on, while the dissociation imagery keeps the complicity reading alive. The song gets to be principled *and* suspect at once. > > One lighter thread: *"strange but I like living this way"* has a small kinship with the strangeness-as-okay motif that runs through [[Weirdness]] — self-acceptance as its own quiet frequency. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the AI meta-layer, and one guardrail *(tap to open)* > There's a coincidence here that the material almost stages on purpose: a song asking *"is this real or am I in an illusion"* — a song *about* fake, plastic reality — is co-performed by an actual synthetic entity. The universe supplying its own punchline. How far the resonance travels depends on an open question: did Hume/angelbaby *generate* parts of the record, or is it human-written and AI-*performed*? Roy's own account is disarmingly low-key — he heard angelbaby's work while getting into AI and Web3, and his manager at the time (Linus) knew the team and connected them; they *"got in the studio and just had fun,"* no pressure. That framing tilts toward incidental. But the collaboration still sits at the head of the [[Concepts/The Digital Double]] lineage, and a song about illusion sung partly by an illusion is hard to fully un-hear. > > **The guardrail:** angelbaby's name echoes the "angel baby" / divine-feminine imagery elsewhere in the project (as in [[Weirdness]]). Resist the pull to fuse them. angelbaby is a real external collaborator — a name-echo, not the symbolic voice. And angelbaby's Hume avatar happening to be a **leopard-patterned rabbit** — fusing Jagwar Twin's own jaguar/leopard and rabbit-eared motifs a couple of years before the rabbit-eared [[Sir Lucius]] — is a genuine curiosity, but it's *Hume's* design, not Roy's. Note the rhyme; don't fold it into the iconography as intent. ## Lyrics ``` Life is good I'm great Another circle 'round the sun The worlds in flames But at least we're having fun Hey kids I'll sing you a song And it won't be very long Some people tell me I'm strange But I like living this way Ah ah ah La viva es buena My life is great My head's an antenna I'm wide awake La viva es buena My life is great But I'm mad And I'm sad And I'm misunderstood Life is good I'm great Another circle 'round the sun The worlds in flames But at least we're having fun I'm good I'm great Another circle 'round the sun The worlds in flames But at least we're having fun Face down but I can feel my body moving Is this real or am I in an illusion Get up get up I'm only human Pupils dilated like I'm bout to lose it So crazy so I turn off the news Living in a lie and we can't see the truth Every one fighting tell me which side are you Keep a smile on my face, too happy to choose Life is good I'm great Another circle 'round the sun The worlds in flames But at least we're having fun I'm good I'm great Another circle 'round the sun The worlds in flames But at least we're having fun But at least we're having fun But at least we're having fun ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (released music, public interviews, public posts).** The single itself and its credits (angelbaby & Jagwar Twin, 2023; the seven-writer list including Josh Dun; the production, mix and master credits; angelbaby on vocals) — verified against streaming. The corrected lyrics (*"Another circle 'round the sun"*; *"La viva es buena"*). The 444 Hz tuning; Roy's own **"Trojan Horse music"** term and the **Jeff Bhasker** *"study nursery rhymes"* mentorship behind it (with Happy Face's deathofmygeneration.fun hold-a-smile experiment as his cited example); the manager (Linus) who connected the angelbaby collaboration; and Roy's account of that collaboration's low-pressure origin — all from the same 2024 interview that opens on this song. angelbaby's Hume "metastar" profile, the Grimes-AI-voice link and the leopard-rabbit avatar, from public press and posts. Roy's contemporaneous shadow doctrine around the release — *"we are becoming more aware of our shadows… as more light comes in, more darkness is seen"* — and angelbaby's *"we can't pretend that everything is just perfect."* The extensive 2024 live-tour run. - **Strong readings.** Joy-as-decision and the Happy Face progression; the defiance-vs-complicity tension held open; the self-aware-bard delivery; the antenna as overwhelmed-awareness; the [[Bounce]] and [[tomorrow (ANGLE OF ETERNITY)]] kinships; the [[All My Friends]] sibling reading. All grounded in the lyrics and the catalogue, but interpretive — read as such. - **Framework & resonance (engagement, not authorial intent).** The Hermetic mappings (antenna↔Vibration, *"too happy to choose"*↔Polarity), which have real public anchors but stay reader's-frame at the line level; and the AI meta-layer, whose reach depends on the unresolved authorship question. - **Still open.** Whether angelbaby *generated* or only *performed* (and so how much thematic weight the AI collaboration carries); the exact vocal split between Jagwar Twin and angelbaby; and a housekeeping tangle worth naming — the single's *label/platform* credits are genuinely mixed across sources, though they resolve into distinct real roles once separated: **Sound.xyz** is the Web3 drop platform the limited edition minted on; **10K Projects** is the DSP label Spotify lists; and **Big Loud** is Roy's usual label/booking home across the rest of the catalogue (which makes 10K Projects the odd one out here). The *release date* likewise clusters across a few early-November 2023 days — the Sound.xyz mint (Nov 2), the everywhere/DSP date (Nov 3), and the run-up social announcements (late October). None of it changes the reading; all of it wants pinning before it's stated as flat fact. ## Read next - [[Happy Face]] — the earlier, less-integrated step in the same thread. - [[tomorrow (ANGLE OF ETERNITY)]] — the same question in a spiritual key. - [[All My Friends]] — the 2023 world's-end-togetherness sibling. - [[Concepts/The Digital Double]] — the AI-collaborator lineage this song opens. - [[Concepts/Duality]] — joy and sadness held as one polarity. - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — the machine the smile survives inside.