The day I wrote this song, cherry blossoms drifted across impossibly blue skies. it was a warm day in January and the air was sweet with the smell of the tiny floating flowers.
I found myself thinking about stories I’d heard of the day they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima… how it was a beautiful day with blue skies and people were in a good mood, despite the war troubles.
And in my mind I saw a young couple walking down a street, maybe in East LA, his hand in her back pocket and his nose nuzzling her behind the ear. When I see it, there are lowered Hondas and people in the park. It’s a beautiful day.
Later, they make love all night as the rain comes down. He holds her in his arms. A single tear rolls down her cheek.
Today’s acoustic version:
Full version:
This Perfect Day
petals drift through the warm spring air
got my hand on your butt got my nose in your hair
got my heart on my sleeve and it’s all too clear
everything i wanted is all right here
this perfect time this perfect place a perfect tear slides down your face It’s such a shame It’s such a shame…
the rain comes down all night long
we just lie there until the dawn
the world’s in your eyes and you’re in my arms
everything I wanted right here all along
this perfect time this perfect place…
one last kiss one last sigh
one last wish though you know it’s a lie
One more laugh just to not have to cry
I love you baby til the end of time
this perfect time this perfect place a perfect tear slides down your face It’s such a shame It’s such a shame…
Ever get really good advice and not seem to be able to take it — even though you think it could maybe even save your life?
No, I’m not talking about quitting smoking. (OK, maybe I am; you have to decide for yourself.)
Sometimes you’re just a deer in life’s headlights, frozen, agonizingly in what should be a moment of indecision… and maybe it is just a moment but it seems to stretch on forever almost as though retelling your life in one of those “How did I get here?” flashbacks. Live or die. Love or hate. Go to work or sleep all day and lose your job.
Forget Her Eyes
forget her eyes forget her voice
forget her soft caress
she’s just some phoney made up girl
up inside your lonely head
forget the night that could have been
the time that never was
forget the dreams that turned to lies
then crumbled into dust
swim or die it’s understood I know just what to do swim or die it sounds- so – good if I could only move
the waters cold
the moon is pale
the lights sparkle on the pier
the musics faint & far away
the ocean’s like a mirror
I see myself for what I am
it all becomes so clear
just a wave upon the sea
and this ocean’s just a tear
swim or die it’s understood I know just what to do swim or die it sounds- so – good if I could only move
(C)1996, TK Major
An autobiographical note: the protagonist in this song is most assuredly not me. But it’s his emotional paralysis that spoke for my matrix of moods as I was writing this song. Autobiography-wise, the smart ass a few songs back who sang “Sometimes at night I call your name / a thousand girls have told me so,” is more up my alley. Pathetic as I understand mature people will think that. Talk about the footprint of pathology, huh? This footnote sez it all.
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
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
