Tag Archives: paper hearts

Love will fool you… love can kill you…

One bridge too few…

All Because of You

I‘ve got a mental block.

Well… I mean… that is to say, there’s this particular one that’s vexing me right now.

(Hell… I’ve got so many mental blocks, I don’t even know they’re there anymore. Like navigating one’s bedroom in the dark, I automatically circumnavigate them. They’re as unnoticeable to me now as a distortion in the space-time continuum, part of the field of everyday reality.)

Fortunately, this one is not exactly earth shaking.

But it does seem, for now, to be, once again, standing in the way of getting a decent version of this song, below, up on the web.

I keep hoping some singer or band out there will take the poor thing under their wing and do a decent version of it and send me a link… [hint, hint] … or something.

Previous versions have been shaky for a number of reasons — even within the wobbly quality orbit of AYoS — not the least of them being that I wrote a melody that was just a bit over my head as a singer (we’ll leave aside argument that, perhaps, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” isn’t just a little bit over my head as a singer).

This time, I tried to disguise my shaky grasp of my own melody with a willfully sloppy self-duet (of the midnight drunken choir variety). Unfortunately, the logsitical challenges of coordinating my small ensemble of personality fragments for the modest task of recording a couple of vocal and guitar tracks was apparently so great that I forgot to perform an important part of the song.

Midway through recording the lead guitar accompaniment I found myself thinking: Where’s that confounded bridge?

All Because of You
[this recorded version omits the bridge]

more stream & DL options

previous versions
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Wednesday, July 19, 2006

lyrics
All Because of You
[includes lyrics for that confounding bridge]

[E~ g#m g#m]
He should have
seen it coming
but he never dreamed
he’d ever have to watch her leave
She laughed all the way to Austin
And she cried the rest of the
way to New Orleans

[g#m ~ f#m]
Baby Doll, it’s all because of you
You always sew destruction
No matter what ya say you’re trying to do
Now always get
whatever it is
you want
and as long as I’ve known you
You always want
what you ain’t got

I have known you
such a long long time
and you know I wouldn’t say
it if it wasn’t true
You don’t have a heart I know
but I’m recently convinced there’s no soul
inside of you

Yesterday’s toys you
throw them all away
you dont even watch
to see their paper hearts in the flames
Like a goddess before
the gods learned how to feel
In your universe your world is the
only one that’s real

[missing bridge: c#m ~ g#m ~]
(look here) Baby
I got the map on you
Every lie you tell
I can drill right through
Baby Doll the fall is coming soon
and when it falls
it’s all gonna be on you

[E~ g#m g#m]
He should ‘a
seen it coming
but he never dreamed
he’d have to watch her leave
(C)2007, TK Major

Each new dream… same as the last.

4 Replies

When Ashley said goodbye...

Each new dream… same as the last.

And yet they kept on coming. A procession of rosy futures… glimmering… flickering… fading.

He stared at the surface of the coffee sitting in the stained mug on his warehouse desk. There was just something wrong with the way he was doing this life thing…

A decade earlier, starting out in life, he thought he had it all lined up. A smart, cute, funny girlfriend who put up with his bullshit, his wandering eye, his compulsive, no-end-to-it truth-telling. (“Well, at least I never lied to you!” he said way too often to his tearful, agonized girlfriend.)

But now, looking at a string of broken relationships stretching back to those golden-seeming days, it looked like an empty, bitter joke…

But, as always, a new dream would come… a new girl, a new set of possibilities… a new set of lies he would tell to her, to himself.

A new dream — but always the same, sad story arc.

He remembered a brief moment when he was about four or five, watching himself standing over a toilet and thinking, this can’t be a TV show, ’cause no one ever goes to the bathroom on TV. But it sure does feel like one…

His bitter laugh echoed against the concrete walls of the warehouse when he thought, Man, I should just fire the writing staff…

OK…. enough of all that. Today’s version of this song is kind of fun, I think, a funky, glam-folk reading of what I’ve always thought of as kind of a sleeper.

Internet Archive page for this recording

previous AYoS versions
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Tuesday, January 09, 2007

When Ashley Said Goodbye

Amber said hello when Ashley said good-bye
I said hold on but there’s no wondering why
when love wants in, love can knock down yer door

I said Amber, I think this is forever
she said baby you’re yanking on my tether
when all is said and done love will even up the score

Love will fool ya — love can kill ya
Love is all that love can give ya
and still you keep coming back for more

Love is funny — love is cruel
Love’ll make Einstein act just like a fool
Love’ll make a tomcat dive in-a swimin pool

All these toys all these games
all these pretty dollhouses going up in flames
if you play around enough you know you’re gonna get burned

Love will fool ya — love can kill ya
Love is all that love can give ya
and still you keep coming back for more

All these toys — all these games…

Leave a reply

When Ashley Said Good-bye

He remembered thinking, “Oh, god, now she’s in love.”

There he was, just crawling out of one bed and now, here he was, with this new girl, spent, lying easily across him, propped up on an elbow tucked between his arm and his ribs, a goofy smile on her lips and a faraway look in her eyes. He thought at the time that they must look like a European coffee advert.

He had thought he was going to give himself some time, some emotional space. But before he knew it she was watching TV at his house four nights a week and cooking him breakfast.

She was warm and comfortable and and one day, just as he found himself getting used to it and liking it — she was gone.

There was no talking to her. There was no asking why. Did he do something? Not really. Was there someone new? Not anyone who means anything.

Was there any chance? No.

He couldn’t believe he asked.

Before her, he wouldn’t have.

He mooned around for days, then weeks. His buddies tried to get him to go out but he sat in the long summer evenings, watching the sky darken through his open window, as the shadows drew the room into darkness and an open bottle of whisky kept an even inch in the bottom of a tumbler by the couch.

He studied the indigo sky over the tops of his bare feet and tried to think about nothing.

It was getting easier everyday.