song

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.

Song 6/52: “The Museum”

Lyrics:

Special treasures, secret pleasures
For the knowing, patient eye
Look at that painting of a woman fainting
Look at that print of a pie in the sky

Halls that echo – spacious, lavish, wide
Every oeuvre curated inside

I love to visit the museum
If there’s new works, let me see ’em
The Met and the Frick and the AGO
Wear some flat shoes and away we’ll go
Colosseum, mausoleum, you can keep ’em
My muse is amused by the museum

Old collections, introspections
Forced to face the world that was
Clear glass cases, databases
Peacefulest of spots because

Each exhibit has its own mystique
Is that sculpture Roman, French, or Greek?

I love to visit the museum
If there’s new works, let me see ’em
The Louvre, the Tate and the Guggenheim
There are way worse ways to spend some time
Colosseum, mausoleum, you can keep ’em
My muse is amused by the museum

I’d be remiss not to mention
The ideological tension:
You can’t claim to care about history
While stealing from other societies
Have you ever looked at your work through the prism
Of white patriarchal colonialism?
Now give back the gold or we riot
If you don’t believe me, then try it

I love to visit the museum
If there’s new works, let me see ’em
Some of these artists did not get paid
Did not get to access the fortunes they made
‘Cause you steal ’em, wheel and deal ’em
Now, return them
Or somebody may need to burn them

Songwriting diary:

I had been reading about this weekly songwriting game/challenge that Austin singer/songwriter Bob Schneider created, in which he sends out a song prompt via email to some musician friends each week and they all write something. I felt inspired by this and picked up the Oliver Sacks book I’m reading, in the hopes that I would come across a phrase that had an inherent musicality like Jeff Tweedy talks about in his book How to Write One Song. I literally hadn’t even read an entire page before I got to this linguistic gem, in a piece about his love for museums: “special treasures, secret pleasures, for the knowing, patient eye.”

I did go to the Met with my friend Steph a few months ago and did recently read a book on the Sackler family so I had some thoughts and feelings on museums to pull from. But mostly I just listened to words in my head, and dug through Thesaurus.com and Rhymezone.com to find the perfect words for each convoluted rhyme.

Initially I was only writing lyrics, assuming I might make them into something else down the line. I sat thoughtfully in my chair and crafted lyrics to a meter I was inventing but trying to stick to. I knew I wanted to at least acknowledge the shady practices (to say the least) of many museums, but didn’t decide in advance that the whole song would take a sharp left turn at the bridge.

Picked up my uke when the lyrics were done, just to see if anything would happen, and of course it did. I had smoked some weed beforehand which I think made my brain make more creative connections and focus more on puzzle-like wordplay, and also made the whole writing process feel playful and fun.

Song 7/52: “Subtweet”

Lyrics:

Nice clean hit of dopamine
My favorite neurotransmitter
It’s probably a bit of a problem
That all of my crushes are people I follow on Twitter

Craft that joke and send it out
Hoping to make you smile
I could be more direct, I guess
But I don’t think that’s really my style

Yes, this is a subtweet
If you know, you know
Who knows if we’ll ever even meet
Or if we’ll get ratio’ed

It’s hard not to stare at my phone
When everyone sexy is in it
It’s tough to tame the craving
It won’t leave me alone for a minute

Friendly reminder that I am available
I’m not a tease on the timeline
But my small talk is not sensational
You say “What’s up?” I say “I’m fine”

Yes, this is a subtweet
If you know, you know
I would slam that retweet
If you told me so

You’re in my DMs
But are we just friends?
Is it so unusual to swoon over your mutual?
Is the feeling mutual?
Or am I delusional?

Yes, this is a subtweet
If you know, you know
If you said we must meet
I could not say no

Songwriting diary:

I was idly thinking about my various Twitter crushes while trying to improvise the start of a song. Initially the lyrics contained way more Twitter jokes, but I felt like they’d get dated fast, so I cut most of them. “Friendly reminder…” is still in there, though, because it makes me laugh.

The song was originally in the keys of A♭ and F#, which are both wacky keys for the ukulele (all barre chords all the time!) so I was finding my hand would cramp up painfully by the bridge. Shifted it up one semitone so I could actually play it and it’s much better now.

The lyrics required multiple edits, large and small, after the initial writing session. (The first part of the second verse was originally totally different: “Wish I could call you in out of the cold/ Come over for Netflix & chill/ You laugh at my jokes and you make me feel bold/ In this essay I will…”) I am a more disciplined writer now than I used to be, so I no longer feel married to every song’s first set of lyrics and am more able to shift stuff around, cut things and make changes. But there is still a period of time after which the song feels “set” and it becomes much more difficult to change anything.

Song 8/52: “Can’t Stop”

Lyrics:

Wish I could focus on anything other than you
But baby, it’s clear that my brain won’t allow me to
Needless to mention, all my attention is split
The thoughts are invasive, and very persuasive, I admit

I can’t stop thinking about you
You cast a spell – now free me from it
I can’t stop thinking about you
I don’t know how, but I know I’ll overcome it

Meeting my deadlines, but barely – it’s happened all week
I feel like a failure, I feel like a certified freak
I turned off my phone and hid it inside of a drawer
But who could have known that it would just make me want more?

I can’t stop thinking about you
You cast a spell – now free me from it
I can’t stop thinking about you
I don’t know how, but I know I’ll overcome it
I can’t stop thinking about you
I don’t know why, but my mind won’t let you go
I can’t stop thinking about you
I can’t stop, I can’t stop

Every memory, every interaction
Has a reaction and fuels my attraction
I can’t take my eyes off your smirk
And I hope I don’t sound like a jerk
But I need to get back to my life and back to my work

I can’t stop thinking about you
You cast a spell – now free me from it
I can’t stop thinking about you
I don’t know how, but I know I’ll overcome it
I can’t stop thinking about you
I don’t know why, but my mind won’t let you go
I can’t stop thinking about you
It’s just too bad that I’ll never ever let you know

Songwriting diary:

One of the most satisfying parts of this challenge so far has been returning to my initial drafts of song lyrics, hours or days after writing them, to edit them, sometimes ruthlessly. I’ll cut or change anything that I just can’t make sound natural in my voice, or anything that catches my ear wrong every time I hear it in the demo, or anything that I’m at all morally or aesthetically uncertain about. I’ll stare into space (and at the Rhymezone and Thesaurus apps) until I come up with a better line. I’ll rebuild the mediocre parts around the parts I think are working, the parts that made me want to bother finishing the song.

This one reminds me of songs I used to “write” by singing into a tape recorder when I was a kid, in that I didn’t play any instruments yet so the style and feel of the songs I heard in my head were not constrained by the medium in which I performed them – so I would write songs that I “heard” internally as being punk, or orchestral, or expansively 1970s, or whatever. Similarly, this song I heard as a big, spaciously-produced, glimmering pop song, the likes of which someone like Carly Rae Jepsen might do.

Song 9/52: “Oh Robin”

Lyrics:

Oh Robin
How we miss your smile
It’s been a little while
How have you been? I wish I knew

Oh Robin
You always made us laugh
The world just isn’t half as fun these days
Not without you

I think of you a lot
Especially when I watch your movies
I think of what we lost
I think of all you made that moves me

Oh Robin
They say that you were sicker than we knew
Oh Robin
I know we never knew the real you

But we saw you from the crowd
Your legacy of love and laughter
I hope you’re in the clouds
Laughing in the great hereafter

Oh Robin
You had a spark of madness in your mind
Oh Robin
I hope you feel the love you left behind

We knew you as a star
A jester and a genie and a nanny
I don’t know where you are
But anyway, I really hope you’re happy

Oh Robin

Songwriting diary:

Had been messing around with this chord progression for a few days, and one day I just started randomly singing about Robin Williams over it. A bunch of different Robin-related things had happened that got me thinking about him (although, frankly, I think about him fairly often anyway). Matt and I watched Awakenings together, which I’ve seen many times but they hadn’t seen before; I’d been reading yet another Oliver Sacks books and wanted to revisit the movie they made from some of his case studies. Robin is absolutely wonderful in that movie. I also saw on Twitter, a day or two later, that there had been some hubbub when some guy posted a photo of Robin with a quote pasted over it that wasn’t something Robin had actually said, and his daughter Zelda jumped in to say that that wasn’t cool and that people have co-opted her dad’s likeness and message for their own purposes.

I wanted to write a song about Robin but didn’t want to do the very thing that Zelda was denouncing. So I focused on my own feelings about him. Initially the third verse contained an anecdote about the time my mom interviewed Robin for work while she was pregnant with me (“Oh Robin / Before I was born, you met my mum / You touched her pregnant belly / She asked you for advice; you gave her some“). I ended up returning to the lyrics the following day to edit them, and replaced that section with more general/hopefully relatable sentiments.

A lot of the writing process was improvisational and based on what I was hearing in my head, as per usual lately. The chord progression is a bit 1960s – it reminds me of some Sam Cooke and Beatles songs I learned back in the day – and has this circular/cyclical vibe that feels like a life cycle to me. I’ve noticed that when I write a song (or part of a song) that’s legitimately good, it’ll get stuck in my head intractably for hours or days; my brain keeps working on the puzzle of it, even when I’m not consciously focusing on it. Often I’ll have “solved” the part that was bugging me by the next day, seemingly through this subconscious processing.

The line about a “spark of madness” is a reference to my favorite quote of Robin’s: “You’ve got to be crazy; it’s too late to be sane… because you’re only given a little spark of madness, and if you lose that, you’re nothing.” I figured it made sense to quote him directly, both because Zelda said that’s what he would have wanted and because that’s just such a great fucking quote. I’ve always related to it, as someone who has struggled with mental illness but has nonetheless managed to routinely channel those struggles into creativity.