Yeah, so there’s a moment after the devastation when the immediate sting subsides. There’s a kind of clarity where you can see beyond the pain, and you realize that the end is not in sight. If fact, the end is very far away indeed, but you know that there is an end, and that’s not nothing. That’s where I was when I wrote this.
Emotions don’t come easy to me, and I never saw music as a good place for autobiography. This album is a bit of an exception in that regard, but this song really highlights that reluctance to reveal me to the whole world. I couldn’t just say “My life sucks, and I wish that she hadn’t dumped me,” because that would be too confessional for me. But the emotions were there. What to do with them?
Well, impressionism has served me well. For me, musical impressionism is about capturing the colors and the light but not worrying about the detail all that much. So the details aren’t about me, but the colors- those are. In fact, all the characters in the song are different shades of me. The father stifling a scream, the mother drifting into a dream. We are many personas and sometimes they are all screaming at the same time.
I love to rhyme, and I love when rhymes come in three. Usually, I follow up a triplet with a big summation line like this one from “Get Out of Touch:
TV man won’t stop telling you
All the things he keeps selling you
All the things that aren’t even helping you
Just turn him off.
Or this one from “Just a Spark”
She’s the leather queen decked in black
With her halo of hair all set back
Surrounded by a hungry wolf pack
Wherever she goes.
But in this song, I don’t do that, and it always had a feeling of incompleteness to me. In fact, like many songs from this period, I thought the song wasn’t finished and that I shouldn’t share it until it was finished, so I didn’t. It was a couple of years later when I recorded it all by my lonesome- which seemed fitting.
To me, the song makes me think of Cat Stevens. He always had a big influence on me, and his music always combined emotion and spirituality in a way that I liked.
A funny thing about the photo by Andrew Dailinger: the girl in the background is my wife. We were not dating at the time, nor would we be for another year and a half. Just goes to show that in your dark moments, sometimes your future is standing right next to you.