getting high on my own supply - 7. "someday", "take care"
7. "someday" (sugar ray, summer 2007) "thirteen" (big star, summer 2007) "take care" [big star, summer 2007)
i think these are the last recordings i made the summer after graduating before i ran out of money from my last student loan disbursement and moved in temporarily with my parents, who were trying to sell their house because my dad had gotten a new job in orlando. earlier in the summer, after realizing i had no idea what to do after not getting into any of the...3? MFA programs i applied to (this will not be the first time in this narrative i am foiled by lucky girl syndrome), i had gotten an english teaching job with a japanese company in osaka (my mom had driven down to take me to the interview in tampa, where i lied about having run a marathon to an interviewer who then responded "how long is a marathon" and i didn't know the answer and yet somehow they still hired me (incredibly low standards and a dysfunctional business culture is how)), though the visa would take a while to come through.
it was a deflating time, in some ways, a hangover (i remember when we bought fake acid from a guy at a party and were so excited to cross into the next stage of psychedelics and instead sat around in the humidity as nothing happened) and yet i felt free too, endless days laying out at the swimming pool in the apartment complex near our house (i also remember going to see the band battles, the last concert i would attend for a long time after). around this time, feeling a need to establish a place for myself as a writer, i got a wordpress.com blog and started posting my songs there using a free plugin called splashcast. my theory at the time was that neither my writing or my songs were good or interesting enough but that if i put them together, it might be worth more.
the last day as i packed up my stuff i wrote:
anyway i had hoped to do a song a day this week as a way of saying “goodbye, tallahassee” but actually spending time in tallahassee as opposed to at my computer seemed like a better use of my time.
and now i am much older and it is friday night and i am still sitting in front of a computer writing in lowercase something that i will send in just a few minutes because that's what i want and all i have ever wanted is to do what i want (scorpio season impending btw). it's been all originals up until now but since these songs are covers, they could be a bit more earnest without feeling unsafe. "someday" was an attempt to take a song i have always very genuinely loved (also do not sleep on "every morning"!) and render it in a more indie aesthetic, built on a bed of warm organ. "thirteen" is a song that i loved to fingerpick (both because it is beautiful and also more importantly because it came naturally to me and was easy to remember) and senior year we had gone to a party where a guy had been playing it by a campfire but strumming instead of fingerpicking, which i made derisive "poser" comment about (as prev noted i am great at narcissism of small differences) but because i was too shy to ever do what he'd done and voluntarily sing in the middle of a party, i had a recurring fantasy that involved an insane scenario in which some stranger challenged me to play (???) and i then wowed everyone with my incredible skill and humility. i do really like the way the syrupy lead guitar darts in and out and through the chords. "take care", a song i'd been introduced to by yo la tengo's cover on summer sun (an album i'd bought at the local record store soon after it came out and listened to a million times), is the very last recording of this first era and unlike the other two was recorded live, in one take. i like how much room tone there is in it, even though so much of my recording career has been about trying to escape the noise floor, because it captures the space i was in then, for one last night, the way a photograph encodes a particular moment of light.
