Shouldn’t I Know?
To my great surprise, I wrote and recorded a song today. Carrie and Justin and I are in the early planning stages of a collaborative album based around a “strange experiences in the woods at night” theme. I was thinking about this at work and bits of lyrics and melodies started to assemble in my head, so I wrote them down before I could forget, and somehow that turned into writing a complete set of lyrics in about an hour. Later, at home, I figured out what chords to play under it, which took another hour or so. A few minutes in the kitchen with my Handy digital recorder (the capital H isn’t a typo; the kind I use is actually called a Handy Recorder), and sha-zam! A demo is demoed, in what for me is probably record time. It’s kinda nice when songwriting takes hours instead of, um, years.
Anyway, at first I was thinking this song would become part of the collaborative-album project, but I’m starting to think it’s got too much of me in it to really work as group effort; I have too many ideas about how I want it to ultimately sound. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but for now I’m thinking it should just be mine, gollum gollum.
I plan to record a less skeletal arrangement of this sometime in the next few months, and when I do I’ll be changing the lines “When I saw on the grass / What could have been a body”; I don’t like ‘em. Too expository.
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My light had been out for a while
My eyes had adjusted partway
When I saw on the grass
What could have been a body
Hard to say, hard to know
Shouldn’t I, though?
Shouldn’t I?
What good would it do to be sure?
Why not turn around, walk away?
But of course that wouldn’t do
So I knelt down beside it
All because I didn’t know
Shouldn’t I, though?
Shouldn’t I?
I tried to make out the shape but it was just a shape
I tried to give it a name but it could not be named
I brought it up to my face and still I couldn’t say
I put my hands all over it
You think your world goes on for miles
You think the sun comes up every day
No, I don’t – no, I don’t
If I said that, I’m sorry
I got lost and I don’t know
Shouldn’t I, though?
Shouldn’t I?
1/27/10 at 11:00 AM
good toon!
1/27/10 at 11:12 AM
Thanks bruddy!
1/28/10 at 5:40 PM
great song, too bad i can’t listen to it at work. it’s safe to assume it is a good song because all the other songs i couldn’t listen to at work have been good. i think your greatest audience is people who can’t listen to your songs because they are at work and they do not have any internal or external speakers on their computers. they do, however, have headphones, but they are all the way in their desk drawer to their left and they’d have to extend an arm to open it and then unzip a pocket in their carry-around bags and then reach to the back of the computer and locate the small headphone jack and it’s all hard to see back there because the computer tower is on the floor and it’s dirty on the floor and these are new pants that i’d like to keep clean for a while because the washing machine at home needs to be repaired and i can’t go to the laundromat because the bank is closed and there’s no place to get change because the change machine at the laundromat has been out of order for a while because they had to lay off George who was their fix-it-guy as well as bathroom attendant due to the poor economy and yes this laundromat had a bathroom attendant because it was a very upscale laundromat in a highly affluent neighborhood where most people have their own high tech laundering devices in their basements and don’t even have to go to the laundromat but they do anyway because everyone in the neighborhood loved George and his witty retorts or his dirty limericks while using the bathroom at this unique upscale laundromat in one of the most wealthiest neighborhoods in the country and now that George is gone the people stopped patronizing the laundromat and they lost a lot of money and it had to close down and has recently been overrun by families of rats from the shitty run down neighborhood which borders the rich one and the rats ate the change machine and chewed up all the washing machines and finished up all the individually wrapped peppermints in the dish in the bathroom that George would hand out to the “good little boys” who washed their hands after using the bathroom and now the rich people from the affluent neighborhood are petitioning to have the laundromat burned down because it’s ruining their property values and making potential home buyers upset when they drive by only to see families of rats sunbathing outside of the once thriving now dilapidated building.
1/28/10 at 5:45 PM
John, if you had a blog that sounded like this I would read it. It would hurt my eyes but I would read it.
The rats ate the change machine?