Hawaii: Part II - Reframing it from the perspective of Simon
Before anything else, there's something fundamental to understand about Hawaii Part II that reframes the entire listening experience. This is not a chronological story. This is not us living inside Simon's mind in real time. These songs were written after. Fifteen years after the tragedy that defines them. Simon, a rootless wanderer who spent his life searching for love, is looking back. And that distinction changes everything. Also, this theory extends from some pre-existing established things like his lover dying in ‘Murders’.
The Story
Simon is a man without roots. He travels, drifts, searches for something he has never quite been able to name. One week he arrives in Hawaii, and there he finds her. A woman unlike anyone he has encountered. He falls deeply, blindingly in love. She seems distant at times, almost warning him of something, but he is too consumed by her to notice.
Days later she is found dead.
And Simon, the foreign stranger who swept a local girl off her feet, becomes the immediate suspect.
Fifteen Years Later
The evidence for this framing isn't interpretive, it's textual. Space Station Level 7 opens with a single line that functions almost as a chapter marker:
十五年後、待ち時間は終わった
"Fifteen years later, the waiting is over."
This is Simon placing us in the timeline explicitly. The trial has long passed. The acute grief has been lived through. He is writing from the other side of it.
This also explains why the album feels nonlinear and fragmented. Simon isn't experiencing these emotions in sequence; he's reconstructing them from memory. Fifteen years of distance. Fifteen years of distortion. The backwards lyrics, the strange imagery, the mythological reaching, these aren't stylistic quirks. They're Simon’s traumatic memory trying to piece itself back together.
The Trial and The Mythology
The trial is a nightmare for Simon. He is filled with shock from the sudden death of his lover and he loses his mind on trial, he can’t form sentences to defend himself, cannot explain the almost supernatural death that just happened, and of course he loses his mind. The love he was searching for and just got, was taken from him with no warning.
Eventually the case is dismissed. Not enough evidence. But Simon is left shattered, trapped in Hawaii, not physically perhaps, but psychologically. Fifteen years in a labyrinth of his own unanswered questions.
He reaches for mythology to make sense of it. Erlkings. Apollo, God of prophecy and the sun. Any framework that might impose meaning on something that resists rational explanation. This isn't madness exactly. It's a grieving mind doing what grieving minds do, searching desperately for a reason.
Dream Sweet in Sea Major
Most readings treat Dream Sweet in Sea Major as Simon's final dying thought. A last hallucination as everything fades.
But consider the runtime. Seven minutes is not the length of a dying thought. Seven minutes is the length of something labored over. Something crafted with intention and care.
Dream Sweet in Sea Major is Simon's magnum opus. His final song, written with a present and deliberate mind, threading every previous song together into one last dreamy, disconnected piece before he makes his decision. It is a suicide note, but not a dark one. It ends not with despair but with acceptance. He is not running from something. He is going somewhere. To her. To the one thing his rootless life had always been searching for.
The ocean isn't where Simon dies. It's where he arrives.
The Seven Stages of Grief
Here is where the architecture reveals itself completely.
Most people know the five stages of grief. But the expanded model has seven. And the seventh stage, the final destination, is acceptance.
The album is the seven stages.
Stage One - Shock: The Mind Electric
The trial. The inability to speak, to defend himself, to process what is happening. His mind fracturing under the weight of something it refuses to accept. The Mind Electric isn't just named after shock, it sounds like shock. The erratic energy, the incoherence, the overwhelm. Electric shock. The mind becoming the experience itself.
Stage Two - Denial: Isle Unto Thyself
While this song can also be interpreted as her pushing him away with warnings of blinding stars. Simple lines such as the mentions of Apollo(the sun god and also related to prophecy) and the line at the very end “I swear I didn’t!” could mean he was already denying something that already happened. This signals that the story isn’t as linear as we thought.
Stage Three - Anger: Murders
In this song, we are told that she has died. The title alone explains it clearly, and of course Simon would be angry. The person he loved most in the world and was searching for was taken away in a moment’s notice. It’s also emphasised by the erratic piano throughout the whole song
Stage Four and Stage Five - Bargaining and Testing/Reconstruction: Time Machine and the mythological references throughout
Simon reaching for Apollo and Erlkings isn't random. It's bargaining, trying to negotiate meaning from loss. And simultaneously reconstruction, attempting to build a new framework to understand what happened when rational explanation has failed completely.
Stage Six - Depression: Labyrinth
In Labyrinth, we can explain it as Simon being trapped in his own mind for years, how many years is unexplained, but this is most likely happening between the tragedy -> 15 year mark, rather than right when she died or 15 years later after he’s already reached acceptance.
Stage Seven - Acceptance: Space Station Level 7 and Dream Sweet in Sea Major
And here is where it all converges.
Space Station Level 7. The lyrics say explicitly, "use the ladder to level seven." Level 7. That is, the 7th stage of grief, acceptance. The song sits in the middle of the album not as a resolution but as a lighthouse, Simon telling us, in Japanese and French rather than English, stepping deliberately outside his own narrative to address us directly: this is not a story of despair. This is a story of arrival. Fifteen years later, the waiting is over. Heaven is waiting.
And then the final song, “Dream Sweet in Sea Major”. This can be viewed as a magnum opus rather than the accepted theory of being Simon’s final memories as he drowns. Rather this can be a suicide song, a final song he wrote before finally drowning himself to meet the one he loves in heaven. He’s finally accepted that he will never know the truth…and he doesn’t care anymore, he just wants the person he loves again.