While this is not the last song on the album, this is the last song that I wrote on the album. I hadn’t written any songs for a couple of months. I wouldn’t write another song for another couple of months. It’s not that it was a dry period for me. The band was doing well. We were starting to get out of town and playing Boston regularly. We were combing through my catalog, looking for songs to play.
One day, I heard that the guy my ex had left me for had stumbled onto a late-night train, and because he was so drunk, he had gotten rolled and beaten up. While I certainly had no love for the guy, it didn’t take much imagination to see myself in the exact same situation, which put me in a real philosophical mood.
Every line is drawn from real life. The first line is about my ex's boyfriend. The second line is about me and astrology. The third line is about me and my bad eating habits, and the final line of the first verse is about me, but really about all of us. And while many of us know we are taking risks, we might not all know about these risks.
Russian roulette is an apt metaphor for many of the risks we take because we'll be fine on any given day. But if you keep taking those risks, then one day…. One day, the food you eat is going to kill you. One day, your drinking will kill you. Of course, one day, you’re going to die anyway, regardless of the risks you take. So it’s not that you shouldn’t take risks, just that you should be aware of the risks you’re taking. You should be aware of the gods you choose.
Yes, I know some will say they’ve chosen no gods. They look at people who have consciously chosen their god with real skepticism. But a god is nothing more than a force to which you show daily submission through prescribed actions. A muslim will face Mecca five times a day. A narcisist will bow down at the alter of their own image. A rationalist will pay homage to the gods of reason. All this despite the fact that on any given day there may be little evidence of god, the self or reason. Yet in every case the believer submits to an overwhelming choice and often deflects as if they had no choice in the matter. Of course, they had a choice.
It’s when those individual choices start to become massive collective choices that things can spin out of control. At the time I wrote the song, our country was at war in Iraq, which seemed like a huge mistake to me. But so many people were behind it. Oxycontin was becoming a big thing and no one seemed to see the fallout from all of that. And so many choices seemed to be about benefiting this moment without much consideration for the future. Whether it was (is) climate change, or whether it was (is) the political system, so many collective choices seemed obsessed with seeing the world through the lens of a given moment.
Make no mistake: we do live in the moment, and we ought to acknowledge that fact, but this moment is connected to all the others, and the negative energy that we send out reverberates across time and comes right back at us, so it’s best to make the right choices in this moment.
The Recording
When I try to organize my music, the songs always fall into albums that are grouped by particular time periods. “Russian Roulette” kind of floats out there on its own island. I first recorded with Phelim White and Andrew Emer. That version was released on Meet the Navigators… Again. At the time we recorded it, it wasn’t on the list of songs to be released for Glory, Glory. It remained unreleased when I was in the studio recording Love and War. I wrote the song very much in between Love and War and The Heights. In the end, I think it works better as a coda, then as a prelude.
The version we recorded for Love and War wasn’t all that different from the one that I had recorded for Glory, Glory. It wasn’t until I was at NuMedia with Bob Brockman that I tried again, and this go round, I was going for a very acoustic vibe, and I think this version sits well on the album, because it was recorded as part of the album. It also sounds like how the song first sounded to me. I remember playing it on guitar and recording it on a four track. If I recall, I just recorded myself playing and singing on all four tracks, so I heard that version for many years in my head.