Song 10/52: “Hey Ex-Boyfriend”
Lyrics:
Hey, ex-boyfriend – I forgive you
Everyone is trying to do their best
Thought I saw a future with you
That’s why, when you left, I got depressed
I only knew the knowledge that I knew
I only had what little sense I had
I only did the best that I could do
It turns out that my best still made me sad
Hey, ex-boyfriend – yeah, you hurt me
Barely ate or slept for like a month
You left me weak, depressed and dirty
But I can forgive you for that stuff
You only knew the knowledge that you knew
You only had the little sense you had
You only did the best that you could do
It turns out that your best still made me sad
Human beings have a habit
Of fucking up the frailest things
Love is hard – it hurts, but damn
It’s worth it for the joy it brings
We’re breaking hearts left and right
We’re crying face-down in our pillows at night
We’re loving no matter how horribly it stings
We only knew the knowledge that we knew
We only had the little sense we had
We only did the best that we could do
And sometimes our best still makes us sad
Songwriting diary:
I had a writing session where I was hopping around between a few different songs and none of them were really working. One was about fuckboys and one was about people who constantly ignore you in favor of their phone while you’re together (needless to say, there is some overlap between those two topics). But they just felt messy and chaotic, and I was running out of time in the week to get a song written, so I decided to table everything for the time being and just write something really simple.
I think I had the vague thought that I should just write about an ex-boyfriend because those memories have always worked well as songwriting inspiration in the past. So I started improvising by singing, “Hey, ex-boyfriend” (which, in retrospect, makes the whole song feel like a bit of a nod to “Hey There Delilah,” especially paired with the musical style). Something I’ve been talking about a lot in therapy over the past year is the idea that most people really are trying their best, most of the time; it’s just that we’re all constrained by our knowledge levels and life circumstances, so unfortunately “our best” isn’t always good enough to keep the people around us from getting hurt. This is a super calming concept for me to contemplate and I wanted to put it into a song. I knew right away that I wanted all three choruses to be the same but vary who they were speaking about (I, you, we) to emphasize the universality of this idea.
The second line of the chorus was originally “[I/you/we] only had the wisdom that [I/you/we] had,” but my spouse thought that this line landed weird and I kind of agreed. I brainstormed and tried out a bunch of other alternate phrases for that spot, including “silly heart” and “human heart.” But then, oddly enough, we did a phone sex scene involving hypnosis, intoxication, and impregnation (not that that has anything to do with the song, because it really does not), and almost immediately after my orgasm, this line popped into my head: “I only had what little sense I had.” I hadn’t even consciously been thinking about the song, but I guess my brain was sort of running it as a background task. I scrambled to my notes app and wrote down the line, and thus the song was completed.
Song 11/52: “I Know You Don’t”
Lyrics:
Walking out in the snow, where nobody knows me
I’ve got no place to go, ’cause nobody chose me
Tried to leave you alone; I feel like you owe me
So I’m out in the cold – damn, you expose me
The truth is I’m ready, I know that I’m ready to go
I know you don’t love me; I know you don’t want me to know
Tried to stop and say hey, but you’re not here yet
No clue what I would say – the way isn’t clear yet
Thought you’d love me someday; you haven’t come near yet
I feel you backing away – please don’t disappear yet
The truth is I’m ready, I think that I’m ready to grow
I know you don’t love me; I know you don’t want me to know
So let me go
I wanna be free
I wanna come back
I wanna be me
I wanna be everything loving you wouldn’t let me be
The truth is I’m ready, I know that I’m ready to go
I know you don’t love me; there’s no way that I couldn’t know
The truth is I’m ready, I’m ready to live and explore
I know you don’t love me; I know I don’t care anymore
Songwriting diary:
This was one of the most intuitive and easy songwriting processes I’ve had this year so far. I set aside a different song I’d been working on and just said to myself, “I’m gonna write a new song,” looked out at the snow falling outside my window, and immediately improvised the first couple lines of this one. I liked where it was going so I made a recording and built from there.
It’s interesting how a lot of the songwriting books and articles I’ve been reading have mentioned that “the song tells/shows you what it wants to be about.” I don’t always find that to be the case – sometimes I consciously choose a topic for the as-yet-unwritten lyrics of an already-devised musical component – but I do think that the best songs are the ones that announce their subject matter to me early on in the form of conjuring certain emotions or thoughts. Seeing the snow reminded me of this one night in my early twenties when I walked home from the train station, which took an hour, instead of taking the subway or streetcar, solely because that route would let me walk past the house of the person I was in love with at the time, and I was desperately hoping we might run into each other. For the entire duration of that walk, I was listening to the John Mayer song “In Your Atmosphere” on repeat, because it reflected a lot of what I was feeling, so I’m sure that the influence of that song is in this one somewhere.
I did some very minimal lyric editing the day after writing this (e.g. changing “your apathy froze me” to “I feel like you owe me“) but otherwise kept it pretty much the same. I wrote it on a Friday and only had until Sunday to record it so there wasn’t time for perfectionism. The night that I wrote it, I felt discouraged, thinking it wasn’t a good song, but fixing up the lyrics made me realize it’s actually pretty lovely. It just had to be polished, like a gem.
Song 12/52: “Vitamin D”
Lyrics:
Such a nice day – well, it would be nice for somebody
But I’ll just stay, stay inside and take my vitamin D
‘Cause any place I go can start to scare me
And nobody can know about the load I carry
Chorus:
Take a pill, take a sunshine pill
Never works, but I hope it will
Drink it down, take your vitamin D
It’s hard to swallow; it had better be
I remember feeling safe, feeling flirty and free
But I never saw this coming, this anxiety
It’s always in my bones and in my belly
And I don’t wanna know what it’s trying to tell me
(repeat chorus)
And oh, I’m tired
Of putting up walls
Of taking the fall
And oh, I’m tired
Of treating a symptom
Instead of the system
(repeat chorus)
Songwriting diary:
There have been so many weeks lately when I’ve gotten annoyed with whatever fragment-o’-song I was working on, put it down, and just decided to write a new/different one. This was one of those. I literally glanced around my room, spotted my bottle of vitamin D pills, and started improvising the first lines.
Gadd9 has been an evocative chord for me lately so it ended up being a prominent one in this song. Sometimes the mood of specific chords is what inspires me in a particular direction.
Been working on myself a lot in therapy lately and this song is kind of just an amalgamation of thoughts I’ve been having during that process – mostly, realizing how a lot of the stuff I’ve done for my mental health previously was just a band-aid on the real problem, which is trauma (“treating a symptom/ instead of the system“).
Song 13/52: “Love is Blind”
Lyrics:
We met in a pod
Thank God
Couldn’t have met any other way
‘Cause we got nothin’ in common, and that’s okay
Between us: just blue walls
They’re giving us blue balls
Love is blind
Love is patient and kind
Love is on camera
Love is unable to slam ya
Love is frustration
Love is subtextual masturbation
Love is not exactly what I had in mind
Love is blind
I think we have bigger problems
Do we even wanna solve ’em?
Don’t you hate how we spend our days?
Don’t you feel like rats in a maze?
Love is blind
Love’s whatever you can find
Love’s an “I guess so”
Guess I’m never saying “fuck yes,” so…
Love is whatever
Love is stress more than it’s pleasure
Love is fucking with my sanity, my mind
Love is blind
Don’t want any drama
But did you vote for Obama?
I hope you don’t hate me for this
But honey, are you an atheist?
Is this shit fundamental or inconsequential?
Should I be more gentle?
Am I going mental?
Can I marry my opposite?
Or should I reconsider it?
Love is blind
Love’s the tie that always binds
Love is devalued
Love is a way to corral you
Love is narcotic
Love is raking in the profit
Love is just another resource to be mined
Love is blind
Songwriting diary:
I was feeling really burned out on writing personal songs this week – or, as my spouse put it, I “need[ed] to give [my] psyche a break from being plumbed” – and had been pondering the psychology of dating reality shows like Love is Blind and Too Hot to Handle, so this song happened.
Like most of the songs I’ve written for this challenge, I started out just improvising whatever came to mind and built from there. The “blue walls/ blue balls” joke popped into my head unprompted (surprised I didn’t think of it while actually watching the show tbh) and that’s the moment when I laughed out loud and decided to buckle down and write the rest of the song instead of just pivoting to something more “respectable” or normal for me.
On a deeper level, this song feels like an expression of how I thought I knew what love was “supposed” to feel like prior to meeting my current partner, but in retrospect, some of my past romances were far more problematic, manipulative, and/or shallow than I actually realized at the time. Watching Love is Blind as someone who is nerdy about sex and dating, it’s hard not to think about the different “faces” of love and how some experiences that feel like love are actually not, or at least not in the way you thought they were.