Phelim always used the phrase "three chords and the truth" to describe a lot of my songs. That was a bit of an exaggeration. Most of my songs have more than three chords. Not this one. This one has the same three chords in the same order over and over. As for the truth... I'll let you decide. For such a simple song, it sure took a while to write. Nearly fifteen years to be exact.
I started writing this song when I was fifteen. By that point in my life, I was deeply enmeshed in Bob Dylan. I wanted to write like Dylan, but I was fifteen and had little hope of achieving that. But Dylan did have some deceptively simple songs. His song, "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" (which you probably would recognize as "Everybody must get stoned") seemed like the kind of song that I could write even as a fifteen-year-old. I tried. I came up with a pretty good chorus: sooner or later everyone's gonna hurt you in the end. I mean, a fifteen-year-old can write that, and anyone can relate to it. But my verses were weak. What I didn't know yet was that Dylan's laundry list songs are deceptively complicated. They sound like they are nothing more than a rhyme followed by a rhyme leading up to a chorus, but they have a direction to them. Listen closely and hear for yourself.
I always thought "Sooner or Later" would become a finished song, but it took another 14 years before I finished it. I had recently broken up with my girlfriend of several years. I had been dumped. We were living together in New York City, which meant that I was homeless. I mean, I had friends, so it wasn't like I had to live on the streets. I was spared that pain at least. For a good three months, I couch-surfed. It was all a blur, but somewhere during that time I wrote the verses to "Sooner or Later."
They are the words of a devastated man. I had been dumped a day before my birthday, and she gave me luggage as a present. I jokingly referred to the day as 5/11. The hurt went deep. And yet... I was very fortunate. I had friends who came to my rescue. So yeah, fifteen years to write a song. You need a fifteen-year-old to come up with a chorus so simple that a room full of strangers can sing it when they first listen to it, but you need someone with some real-life experience to put that chorus in context.
One of my fondest memories of "Sooner or Later" is when we first played Bowery Ballroom. We had the entire room singing along. How weird is that? The song is about how shitty people are, and yet it somehow ended up being a sing-along anthem. I guess it just goes to show that even in our darkest hour, we can find some light.
The Recording
If you’re a fan of The Navigators, then you’ve already heard this song before. You can listen to it on Meet the Navigators… Again. It’s one of my favorite recordings. When I thought about recording this song, I thought about using the version that had already been recorded. I certainly wouldn’t have started re-recording it from scratch.
So I had no plans to re-record it, but one night I was at NuMedia studio with Brian Griffin, Naren Rauch and Darren Eboli. We were doing a live recording for Bob Brockman’s Night Sessions. I had three jobs at that point in my life. I was doing early childhood classes in the morning, worked in a lighting store in the afternoon, and then taught SAT prep in the evenings. I had gotten to the studio around 9 that night, and me and the band proceeded to wait until around midnight when the tape started rolling. We recorded what would later become “Roll Baby Roll”, “Fairy Tales” and “Sooner or Later.”
Of course, they didn’t work as live takes. The main problem was with my vocals. I didn’t have the energy after sixteen hours of racing all over the city to give it my all. I re-recorded my vocals, my guitar, added some keyboards and some backing vocals. It wasn’t really a live recording anymore. The original plan of capturing a live performance hadn’t really come together, and the Night Sessions never went anywhere.
It was long after that that NuMedia had shut down operations in SoHo. I didn’t have a studio to go to anymore. It was around this time that I met up with Andrew Lee again. He had a studio in Brooklyn, and I came over and we overdubbed some electric guitar on these songs. He kept the tracks and added some slide guitar on the tracks and really made it sound like a complete thought.
But I didn’t really have plans to rerelease this song, and The Heights looked like it was never going to get made. I was at the end of a two-year stretch where I had gone from being a touring musician signed to a label with a booking agent to losing all of that and being at square one in my thirties. I just couldn’t appreciate if there was anything there.
Fast forward about a dozen years. I was sitting at home late one night and I came upon Andrew Lee’s mixes which included “Sooner or Later.” It was like hearing the song for the first time. I had originally planned on putting it out as part of Standing on a Rock, but then I collected this recording (and all the other recordings) that would become The Heights, and I began to feel like the album might actually get finished.
I really don’t like putting the same song out twice, but these versions are very different. The original recording has a lot more energy and bite. It was very fresh. The version on The Heights sounds like it’s been through some stuff. It’s older and wiser. Hopefully, we are too.