Remember ’09 Hit ‘Fireflies’? Owl City Just Explained Its Dumbest Lyric

That being: “Cause I’d get a thousand hugs / From 10,000 lightning bugs / As they tried to teach me how to dance”.

It’s like, woah woah woah there, Young: if you were to receive one hug each from 10,000 lightning bugs, wouldn’t that make 10,000 hugs total? Not just one thousand, as per your lyrics?

You can’t sing about a mathematical theory as messed up as that one without expecting the Internet to demand a detailed explanation.

One Twitter user decided to end the bamboozlement once and for all by confronting Young direct.

@owlcity In the song “Fireflies” you state “I get a thousand hugs from 10,000 lightning bugs.” How do you interpret this statement?

— pryce (@pryce_d) May 31, 2017

@owlcity Does each firefly hug you 1,000 times or do only 1/10th of the bugs give you a hug?

— pryce (@pryce_d) May 31, 2017

Young replied with a v. scientific explanation that definitely says *something* about how much spare time he has, but is fkn hilarious nonetheless. Not to mention cathartic if you, too, have wondered how a man can be hugged by 10,000 lightning bugs.

Please enjoy this excerpt:

“I was the recipient of 1,000 hugs from 10,000 lightning bugs for a grand total of 10,000,000 hugs. As the lyrics of the song clearly state, the average layperson would not believe their eyes if 10,000,000 fireflies were to illuminate planet Earth, nor would the average person conclude by natural instinct that 10,000 lightning bugs, acting as a collective group, are capable of embracing a human being 1,000 times without difficulty.

“By the same token, a gathering of lightning bugs in such vast numbers form a sort of ‘swarm,’ and a swarm can collectively surround a human and deliver a ‘hug’ that a single firefly, acting according to the dictates of his own conscience, simply cannot. Consequently, I was embraced 1,000 times by 10,000 luminescent insects.”