Like a ghost

You hope you're just a memory to her, as you squat on the heels of your boots in a forlorn little park on a hill over the city, smoking a cigarette and looking down. You want to be a memory... faint, as though you died in an almost forgotten war.


Another reading of this song... not sure why I felt compelled to do it again, just now. I was fooling around with the minor slide tuning and remembered I used to do it in a similar tuning a few years back. The recent version had an almost jaunty folk-funk thing going... here I go back to a darkly minor feel... the feel of a storm gathering. I was hoping to suggest a cold, restless spirit driven to self-exile by his own emptiness. Not to get purple on ya.

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AyoS October 22, 2005
AYoS August 4, 2006

World So Big*

The world is so big
then again the world's so small...
I might be in your arms tomorrow night
or I might never make it home to you at all

true love, baby, the bottom drops out
and then you fall...
it only happens one time baby
if you're lucky maybe not at all

I could live a thousand lifetimes
I'd never forget a single one of your lies...
I could die a million times
ant the ghost of you would still draw me back to life

*name changed from "The World Is So Big" (9/25/2007)

Looking for reasons... there aren't any reasons

Love and confusion.

Which is the hand, which the glove?

The relationship that had just ended when I wrote this song had been, for most of its near-three year course, one of relative stability. Oh sure, we broke up once or twice and there may have been a few indiscretions (well, there were) but by and large, we had a certain stability.

Until nearly the end of our journey together...

Like hitting a wind shear at 40,000 feet, we were thrown like rag dolls around the now-emptied fuselage of our airliner of love... bouncing off the walls and each other until we were thrown out, unceremoniously, in seperate heaps on the tarmac of our Terminal Destination.


As I wrote when I posted the first version of this song here on AYoS nearly a year ago, I was sitting in a light rain with a cheap guitar in my lap, looking out over a stormy Mexican sea when I wrote this song. I'd gone down to Mexico by myself to get away from my relationship woes and this and two other songs came spilling out soon after I sat down with a pint of Tequila and a 6 pack of Bohemia.

But this version owes little to the mood of that time. It's as goofy as the silly season can get, complete with falsetto and bass back up vocals (all courtesy of my 3-octaves-of-nasality vocal range) and loose acoustic boogie guitar.

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AYoS September 26, 2005 [folk]
AYos March 03, 2006 [rough production demo]

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE

Some people say
Love is a game
but I'm telling you now that I wasn't playing
when I fell in love with you

Here I go again
Looking for reasons where there aren't any reasons
Here I go again
looking for trouble... I'm already in trouble

That day in my car
don't say you don't know
You held me so close
begging me to let go
I told myself you were just confused

Here I go again . . .

You always said
that it was fate
I'm telling you now
that I was framed
when I fell in love with you

Here I go again . . .

A dog barks
the wind howls through the night
I whisper your name and
stare in the fire
I can' keep myself from calling out to you

Here I go again
Looking for reasons where there aren't any reasons
Here I go again
looking for trouble... I'm already in trouble

(C)1981, TK Major

Mea Culpa, Baby

AYoS premier...



I'll admit it. This song started just 'cause I liked the sound of the title. It seemed to resonate with my "Sure, I'm guilty -- so what?" attitude in the days when I wrote it -- as well as my not-entirely-whimsical fascination with the notion of the trickster-teacher. Mix with a little half-baked metaphysics and serve cold...

The lyrics, themselves, sort of spilled out as soon as I wrote down the title.

Which is not to say they are in any way irony free. In fact, I felt, reading them back, like I recognized a facile if far-fetched rationalization for my particularly careless -- even callous -- treatment of a long-ago love.

Whether my subconscious, guided by the muses, was trying to make sense of the emotional confusion of early love or merely looking for a convenient metaphysical fig leaf, my conscious mind liked the cognitive dissonance of it all.

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Mea Culpa, Baby

Mea culpa, baby
means I'm guilty, I'm the one
I'm the one who broke your heart
but it wasn't just for fun

I watched as your friends turned away
when you turned to me
I laughed as I left you alone
I set your little soul free


I'm not going to tell you
where I hid your heart
you'll just have to figure out who I am
You must go back to the start

I am everything you are not
I'm the other side of the line
Just a matter of push and pull
but the boundary always hides

[circa 1975]

(C)2006, TK Major