They used to call me the bard of bitterness, denial, and regret. Well… it was kind of a one-liner I made up to put on my show flyers. But… you know.
I think I mentioned sometime last year that a girl I’d once dated, early in our relationship, asked me to sing her a love song. “I don’t mean you have to sing it to me,” she said. “That would seem a bit presumptious, I think.” College girls…
“Just sing me something romantic and I’ll pretend it’s about me.” And she laughed.
I had my songbooks right there — I’m almost completely incapable of performing any of my songs from memory (crazy as that might seem considering most of them have no more than 3 or 4 chords spread over 3 or 4 quatrains) — so I started flipping through them, giving one line descriptions of each song as I flipped by…
“Drug overdose song. Betrayal song. Threw-it-all-away song. Another betrayal song. Fare-thee-well-and-flog-off song. Another threw-it-all-away song…
“Ah, here it is, my love song: ‘I Must Be F—— Nuts.’ I knew I had one.”
(It’s a good one but I’ve yet to figure out how to do it justice in this blog. It’s… well… it’s a bit vulgar. But it is a love song.)
Anyhow, those who’ve been following this blog will probably have already guessed that there were a lot of threw-it-all-away songs in those books. It’s like, oh, you know, a recurring theme, I guess. Though anyone with access to a DSM might come up with a less charitable characterization.
I’m not really sure why I like this one so much… except maybe that I crack myself up every time I sing the line quoted in the title of this post. I’m certainly not the libertine the line would suggest but there’s still some kind of poetic truth there, nonetheless.
Internet Archive page for this recording
AYoS version 19 November 2005
AYoS version 2 March 2006
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
it made her hair just glow like it always used to be
just 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 can remember a thing
yet everytime I think about holding hands in school
my heart just pounds 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 thre it all awaly and now I want it back
and I know it can never be so
[I know it can never be so]
and 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
(C)1998 TK Major
October
