"I feel that so much of my life around you has been sleuthing, prodding, collecting notes in a little spiral bound book, playing the ever tempermental sherlock trying to piece together clues about who you are, where you've been, and why I couldn't ever feel you."-- from my journal, about 2 years ago.
I've been singing to the less attractive sides of myself of late. It's a pleasant thing, really - you take this gnarled, ugly part of yourself and lullaby it to sleep, cooing prettily at it while you tell it all the ways it's fucking up your life. I wrote Abigail about my obsessive nature, and Another Song (as well as most of my recent songs) about my constant desire to be someone's shiny, saving, knight.
Of late, I've been becoming rationally aware of my paranoid tendencies. They are brought up often in relationships, and the general gist is:
- Something small happens. A distance in someone's voice, an unreturned text message.
- I extrapolate an entire universe of rejection, pain, and loneliness around the event.
I could never find a way to wrap the concept precisely enough in a song, it seemed too heavy and intellectual a topic to really address properly. I made a very literal attempt at it with a song called "Everything Given", but I lost whatever I was driving at. It's common enough for me to lose fire on a song after writing a verse and chorus, I'm not sure if the feeling simply passes, or if I there just wasn't enough resonance in the first place, but I'm much more likely to starve than to smother the baby.
The other week, though, after a particularly unpleasant episode of worry and paranoia, I found this song lying on the ground, whining to be picked up. I've had a story in my head for awhile about a guy who, after his girlfriend leaves him, gets so stoned that he starts to believe that it fell apart because his cell phone dropped a call at a particular moment. It wasn't a big leap from there to my own craziness, to the part of me that believes - on some level - that a dropped call means someone will ultimately reject me. The bits where the character starts blaming flocks of birds for foretelling the end of love is, I dunno, just for fun.
Here's the lyrics.
When the odds are ten to one And your legs are on their last And the night is closing fast And all the birds are mocking you Singing "nothing ever lasts" And the night is closing fast Damn the odds and damn the birds It's not a sign, they just sweep the sky and it's absurd All you think you know From just a disconnection of the telephone In her arms be still Yeah the signal's weak in here Though the light shines effortless And your mind is such a mess Every night and every day Study every little breath And they all say nothing lasts Goddamn the odds goddamn these birds It's not a sign, they just sweep the sky and it's absurd How all I've known I've spent my whole life as some sorrowful Sherlock Holmes Her hands sweep it away
