getting high on my own supply - 6: "if"

episode 6: "if" (spring 2007)

the most represented subject in my catalog is not sex or drugs or god or revolution but instead, unfortunately (for both me and you) "wanting to write a song but not really having anything to say" (the second is television, love probably third). while i've always been a reader, i've never really been a lyrics person; listening to music has always been a kind of sensory trance where bad-enough lyrics can break the spell but good or great lyrics, though i occasionally grasp a phrase, mostly float along under the surface of the song (this is true even of rap, though the words are more important there than in melodic music). most of my favorite songs i could not sing most or all the words to without a karaoke machine and despite having in my life played hundreds of different songs, some of them many times, there are very few that i actually know by memory all the way through.

but the music i have always loved most is pop music and for pop music you have to have words. i always want to be making some form of art and nothing makes me happier than to finish something, even if what is finished is in another way unfinished (because it is imperfect, undercooked). i think i have standards and often (in short bursts) enjoy polishing and tweaking and iterating but i'm also emphatically not a perfectionist (lmao like you the person who reads my unedited diary would ever think that)—i want to reach the closure of completion and then i want to move on to the next one. "if" is a dark jazz riff that my hands found, these three note chords on the lower middle strings linked with single notes. i tried to write some something over it that felt appropriately standardsy and i feel like the words start off promising in that direction:

if you were blue
and couldn't pull through
i'd go to the ends of the ocean

in my canoe
i'd bring back to you
a color-changing potion

and i played that bit over and over again and started to write some of the other verses (always easier once you have established the rhythm of the words with one of them) but then i knew there needed to be a chorus for it to be a song and i found some chords that worked musically but instead of like actually saying something in the chorus i say something about not being able to say something because that is all i had the capacity for in the moment and i wanted to finish writing/recording (these things have almost always been very tightly connected, since i would not see the point in writing a song if not to record it):

and if i knew 
what to do
i'd do something for you

yeah if i had 
a fucking clue
well that'd be something too

i flesh it out a bit more in the second chorus and the rest of the song has stronger moments and weaker ones and ones which, as discussed in the previous point about my singing, would have been better with just a tiny little bit more editing ¹, but you can tell by the fact that the closing solo features, for some reason, dry spoken narration calling attention to how perfunctory and incongruous it is musically to the mood of the song that even for me i felt self-conscious about the lack of substance. all that said, i'm still happier to have this imperfect thing than nothing (story of my life) click send.

¹ like, okay, specifically this part:

if you were cold
i'd simply fold 
you into pastry dough 

i'd bake you until 
you'd lost all your chill 
and flake crust off your toes`

like if i had just said nose that would be an adorable image but instead the first word that came to my mind and thus that i used when recording five minutes later without thinking of it had to be "toes" and it is gross there is no romance in crusty toes (i mean for me, no kinkshame, you do you). semi-related (in that everything in this newsletter is semi-related because it is coming out of my brain) every time i listen to "lacy" by olivia rodrigo which starts with the line "lacy, lacy, skin like puff pastry" that always seems weird to me because i imagine cooked puff pastry and that does not seem like healthy skin and it makes me think of a parody of the song about john wayne gacy called "gacy" but i guess sufjan kinda got there first).