I'm getting back into this thread -- my favorite kind of thread, with everyone's insights into the songs.
LilBear mentions "Travelling Alone" and I've also been really captured by this one lately. The subject is one of those Very Big Fundamental Subjects that Ron seems to have no trouble boiling down into a great song.
When I was a kid my family was often driving off on long vacation trips. There were times when we would slowly pass another station wagon full of family + kids. I would get the weirdest feeling of slowly crossing over the speeding highway into the back of the other car and becoming a part of that family -- becoming a completely different person, or perhaps one of them. I didn't want to leave my own family, which was a happy-enough unit -- I was caught up in this very weird curiosity: "why am I me and not another person?" It was more than an intellectual curiosity -- being a kid I would feel it in my gut.
I'm reminded of this by Ron's example of a soul's exit strategy: the temptation to step in front of the approaching tram. Why are we "here" and not "somewhere else"? Why are we who we are and not someone else? I've not read (or understood) much philosophy so this is still just gut stuff for me.
Coincidentally, when I first heard "Travelling Alone" I was reading a book by Douglas Hofstadter called "I Am A Strange Loop" in which he defines conciousness (human and animal) scientifically. Or rather, he attempts to say what one's "soul" is. As a scientist he insists that a soul or self is entirely the product of brain patterns interacting with sensation and memory to create the illusion of a lone, central observer. But he also believes that each brain also is home to lesser copies of those other selves or souls we know -- especially those we know well and most especially those we love -- those individuals whose lives, inner lives and memories we know so well that they are nearly our own.
According to Hofstadter, we can't exactly read minds, but our souls, though mere neuron-phantoms, overlap and ripple through each other nonetheless. As for an afterlife, we live on through those who knew and loved us for as long as their brains live and harbor us. So eventually our afterlife "dies," too. But I'd like to add that I think our thoughts, words and deeds live on much, much longer through good old cause and effect. Karma, iow 
Anyway, I find myself wanting to say to anyone in the position of the "Travelling Alone" protagonist: maybe we're not entirely travelling alone.
Meanwhile, "Thoughts and Prayers" is my current favorite ESOT song!!!
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