Monthly Archives: November 2005

Swim or Die

Sometimes

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As promised, here’s the song I wrote immediately before yesterday’s “She’d Be Mine” — telling much the same story from a somewhat different perspective — and in a significantly different style.

Although this was originally written as a country/roots oriented song, as well, it seemed to drift inexorably toward a funky stripped down reading, as can be seen in the ‘studio version‘ below.

(I’m not really sure how to make the distinction between the fully produced versions that already exist for some AYoS songs and these, highly informal — okay, slapdash — acoustic versions. The ‘studio versions’ were also recorded at home on my own gear. My studio at my old house was my office. Here in my tiny beachside flat, my studio — and my office — is my dining room table. Hell, it’s the dining room table, too.)

Just below is the little story/blurb I sometimes used to promote this song in the “good ol’ days” at the old mp3.com (where the ‘studio version’ garnered many thousands of plays over the several years that indie music paradise was open for biz).

You’ll note that it’s more or less a prose retelling of yesterday’s “She’d Be Mine”:

That last time he saw her will always stick in his mind. She was getting out of a white Volvo, a toddler nearby and a baby in a stroller. The wind and the sun caught her hair and it drifted in slow motion. For an instant the last eight years were a dream.

He hadn’t seen her since just after her wedding. He’d been invited, she even called, but he didn’t go. He told himself it was just an accident he was playing guitar in the park across from the church as she and her new husband ran out to the limo in a hail of rice. The sun caught her hair, then, too.

He could smell the Eucalyptus trees at the edge of the parking lot and for a second he was aware of his own cigarettes and whiskey, dirty denim smell. He shifted back a little into the shadow of the awning and tipped his head into the big paper cup of acrid chainstore espresso — but she might as well have been in another universe. He guessed that, really, she was.

Sometimes

Sometimes I think about ya
think about, think about
think about the things
I thought I’d do for you

Sometimes I wonder
how you’re doing now
I think about it
but I think it turned out best
when I think it through

I know I let you down
I let you down, I let you down
I let ya down hard
and blamed it all on you

I threw your love away
and I laughed and I laughed
I laughed until I died
and when I came to…

the world — it was dead
and I walked around and I walked around
I walked around the world
but I couldn’t find you

I tore my soul open
it was empty, it was empty
a tunnel into nowhere
and I never got thru

sometimes I think about ya
think about ya, think about ya
think about the world I mighta had with you

(C)1999 TK Major

She’d Be Mine

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She'd Be Mine

When I was a kid, southern California was still a place of separate towns and cities, with open space in between, usually farmland, orchards, wetlands, or just plain “unimproved” land, interspersed with patches of oil fields and a few military bases.

My part of it, Orange County, consisted mostly of flat coastal plain, and, at its eastern edge, rolling foothills. Along the the coast were expanses of dairy fields, interspersed with soy bean fields, and clusters of oil wells.

Toward the eastern foothills, where I grew up, it was mostly orange orchards. At one time there were hundreds of thousands of trees, typicallly in methodically neat rows. The orchards were interlaced with long, straight, narrow roads, just big enough for two farm trucks to pass each other.

And almost all of the roads were lined on both sides with single rows of eucalyptus trees, planted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as wind breaks against the hot, fierce Santa Ana winds.

[As I write this, we’ve just been whipped by several days of Santa Anas and the skies are a smoky salmon color in the fading sun, the smoke of distant brushfires biting at the sinuses and throat.]

Most of the eucalyptus trees are gone now, but you still see rows of them scattered around, particularly as you near the foothills. You’ll often see them at the edges of the parking lot of older shopping centers.

It was just such a row of eucalyptus I had in mind for the opening images of this song.

Normally my songs come to me as theoretically clever or poignant or just weird phrases but this song really came an image: the protagonist seeing his long-ago girlfriend in her role as a young mother with her children (and the convenient symbol of a certain kind of domesticity, the iconic white Volvo)… parallel universes both inhabiting the same shopping center, with its row of eucalyptus filtering the slanting afternoon sun.

Tomorrow, I’ll be posting something of a companion piece to this song, “Sometimes.” I wrote today’s song immediately after “Sometimes” — and, as often happens, the same themes and general emotional schema run through them — but they’re very different songs, highlighted by very different acoustic performance styles (at least in the case of these two versions).

She’d Be Mine

Last time I saw her a couple years ago
she was shovin’ a couple of kids in a white volvo
the sun came down through the eucalyptus trees
made her hair just glow like it always used to be

right then I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today

the pool house the beach house the boat house by the lake
I’ll be damned if I remember a thing
but everytime I think about holding hands in school
it makes my heart just sing like it always used to do

right now I wish I could have said the words…

sometimes when I sleep I call her name
a thousand girls have told me so
I threw it all away and now I want it all back
and I know it can never be so
I know it can never be so

right now I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today

October 1998
(C)1998 TK Major

Baby Was a Friend of Mine

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Mythic super-anti-heroine alert. Yep, it’s yet another Baby song.

Like Prometheus, half-man and half-god, chained to his rock and feasted on by birds of prey day after day only to be magically restored the next, ready to be tortured and maimed again… forever (for the crime of sneaking the gift of fire to Man… those “full” gods could be downright mean), the increasingly mythic Baby, child-woman, goddess-whore, seems doomed to appear endlessly in my songs.

Who is Baby? I asked in an earlier post.

I suggested that, while there were undoubtedly aspects of old girlfriends and love interests, Baby also probably represented a willful, destructive part of myself, as well.

I also noted that when I had just started playing guitar and writing songs as a 20 year old failed academic poet I swore I’d never use the word “baby” in a song unless I was referring to an infant. The Brian Eno song, “Baby’s On Fire,” however, opened up my mind and gave me new license to rise above pretense and embrace pop music as an idiom. Yo.

Anyhow, moving right along, we don’t really know much about Baby — at this point — except that she is apparently in the permanent past tense. A song not yet on AYoS, “When Baby Can’t Go On” seems to suggest that she may have written her own coda, perhaps by taking one final moonlight swim. (Not to be confused with the also upcoming “Swim or Die.”)

The nice thing about writing her out by swimming her out to sea is that it has an open-ended lack of finality… what I like to think of as a disturbing lack of closure.

Because Baby is not at peace and she never will be… she’s a restless, hungry soul, doomed to move through my songs, bringing lust, longing, and ultimate sorrow to our hapless hero again and again.

You’d think the poor sap would learn.