24 | November | 2005 | A Year of Songs

All I Need Is the Sun

A thanksgiving song.

I’m at that point in my life when I’m mostly beyond being afraid for myself, but like anyone, I have my moments of darkness and doubt.

When things are darkest… I count my blessings.

It’s a tactic that not only dovetails nicely with my innate perversity, but which has served me well over the years. As I mentioned in a previous post, 25 years ago (last month) I was hit by an inattentive driver while riding my motorcycle and ended up in the hospital for 2 months (most of that in traction) with an “exploded” hip, a smashed femur, and a shattered ankle.

They pieced me back together (my ex-rays look like I was attacked by the contents of a hardware store), but there were some tough times along the way, I was on crutches for 6 months and a cane for 5 years. (Turned out I was walking on a leg that was still broken. Long story that reinforces the importance of second opinions, which I discovered late.)

Anyhow, the thing is, when things got tough, as they occasionally did, I counted my blessings. (I used to feel bitter that I didn’t have any shoes until I saw a man who didn’t have any feet. You know?)

I also drank… I’d say ‘but that’s another story’ — but it’s actually this story, or more properly the story of this song.

At any rate, here’s a guy who, I’m thinking, is living in that tiny postage-stamp sized bit of grace afforded those with little left to lose…

These lyrics were originally written as a sort of rap to go with music from Brit techno whizkid Deakin Scott but, while Deakin and I collaborated more or less successfully on an earlier track (the lyrics for which are my “Mountains Come, Mountains Go”) the track these were written for never came together and I finally sat down with my acoustic guitar a few months later and came up, more or less, with these chords.

I say ‘more or less’ because I actually had all but forgotten this song and before yesterday and had quite likely not played it twice since 1999. A shame, since I really like it. It’s not the first song I’ve written or track I’ve recorded in a ‘creative phase’ that’s gone forgotten for a long period after the arc of sometimes fevered productivity has passed.

All I Need Is the Sun

looking for my place in the sun
ah but everything is already gone
a bottle in a bag and a bun
now all I need is the sun

caviar and champagne are fun
limos and callgirls the run
but those cocaine days are done
now all I need is the sun

kingdoms and palaces galore
yachts and planes for sure
diamonds and oilfields and mines
yet I traded them all for this wine

caviar and champagne are fun…

I’ve spent a thousand times what you’ll ever own
I had twenty people answerin’ my phone
You– you’d never get through… yet now
here I am drinkin’ with you

caviar and champagne are fun
limos and callgirls the run
but those cocaine days are done
now all I need is the sun

1999-11-01
(C)1999, TK Major

Fell

First up… the lyrics for this song expose one of the dangers of writing a ‘serious’ song in colloquial idiom. The lyrics, on the page, look… how shall I put this to spare my delicate feelings… stupid.

Sure… I grew up saying things like “he might ‘a fell” instead of the proper “he might have fallen” and it does sound completely natural to my ear. But, dang, it looks stupid when you write it out. I look like a gol dang illiterate, I do. Yup.

Anyhow, I never really felt like I finished this song (weak second verse… some too obvious phrasing… whaddya know, everyone is a critic) — but that never stopped me from performing it frequently back in the 90’s. I suppose it fit my mood at the time, which was to the dark side of melancholy.

When I performed it back then, I often mentioned that it was my understanding that there was a Jewish tradition (probably picked up from friends, books, or movies, since I, myself, am not Jewish) suggesting that, without proof otherwise, a possible suicide should be considered an accident — so as not to send a message of despair and futility to the community, particularly young people.

That was the context in which I conceived this song, building what little development there is around that central ambiguity.

Several years ago I became acquainted with an Americana band that I discovered on the web, The Pernice Brothers. (They were a Subpop band, so it wasn’t like they were deep underground, or anything.) I liked them enough to buy the 1998 album, Overcome by Happiness.

On that album, I discovered a song about suicide that had a line strikingly like the opening line of this song (“They found his car” in my song, “Her” car in the Pernice Brothers tune) with a melody nearly identical to the melody I used to use. (On this version I somewhat unconsciously changed the melody and decided to leave it.)

From there, the songs deviate quite a bit and, entres nous, I believe the Pernice Brothers song is a decidedly superior song (and has a very pretty string arrangement, to boot).

Still, I thought it might be worth noting, should any fellow Pernice Brothers fans stumble on my song here and note the (to me) small but striking similarity: my song was written in 1991 and performed frequently in public in the next few years — often at the Long Beach club Bogart’s, host to many a touring band over the years.

But, hey, great minds think alike (ahem) and I have no doubt that if you put 10,000 moody songwriters in a room and turn them loose at least a couple of them will come up with the intro lines to the song below…