Winter stretched from a time before memory into a future he could no longer imagine. Fear seemed like a dream from a happier time — a time when there was still something left to lose — A luxury that had already been spent and borrowed on.
Now, there was just winter…
This version adds a little accompaniment guitar but is fairly similar to the previous AYoS version, from last November 7.
Turn down this street
back down that alley
there is no escape and there is no stalling
The future is here
and it’s more of the past
All I remember
is falling and falling
Leave me alone just let me be with wounds this deep they just have to bleed
Desperation is short supply
I used up my panic in the crises last year
It’s hard to worry, it’s hard to care
when you’re so tired of anger
and you’re so tired of fear
Leave me alone…
No point in crying, laughing or dreaming
no point in love, no % in fear
desperation is in short supply
so tired of anger
2 dazed 2 care
Leave me alone just let me be with wounds this deep they just have to bleed
The guitar in the perhaps familiar graphic to the left is not the guitar I was writing about when I wrote that song. A photo of that guitar graced the previous AYoS version of Guitar and was the subject of that day’s blog entry.
This guitar to the left is not just the AYoS logo, it’s actually pretty much the AYoS guitar, providing all but a few of the guitar parts on the songs so far. (The others I’ve used were my $75 12 string and my $50 3/4 size guitar.) It was sitting on a stand in my living room when I shot this. I glamorized it a bit in my photoeditor. There aren’t really fluffy clouds in my front room. As a rule.
The car in the second verse of this song was my first car, a Karmann Ghia that started out yellow (a great color for curtains in the breakfast nook, maybe) but got painted a cool smokey metallic grey when I plugged half a week’s wages into an impossibly cheap (yet still not cheapest) paint job.
At the time I wrote this, the grey paint was still shiny — a few moments within a narrow sliver of time when I actually almost felt cool in my Ghia. (But, actually, after the paint oxidized in that first, single season, it had a kind of naturalness to it that ultimately felt pretty comfortable.) I loved that car but I put it through hell. I sold it for a few hundred bucks just at the dawn of that peculiar era when Ghias actually did gain a certain sort of geek hipster cool. I guess.
Anyhow, I did love that car. We went everywhere together.
I Can See Myself in My Guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
It’s getting kind of old but it’s shiney
I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my car
I don’t care what anyone says we’ll go far
I can see myself in my car
out in the country, we’ll go far, we’ll go far
I can see my self in everything
ain’t nothing cosmic, it’s just there
I can see myself in you
and you know I see you everywhere
I prefer to think of this track as the mix I was working on when I realized it was almost midnight and I needed to get an AYoS song posted.
The original version (below) of this, from my (one man) band, one blue nine, was released in 1999. It was a busy, somewhat funky trip hop thing and it did pretty well on the old mp3.com, rising into the trip hop top ten for a brief period (No. 7, if I recall correctly).
The piece is built around the found sound of a 60’s survivor retelling some of her experiences in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love.
It was a time when love was in the air and you had to be careful what was in the Kool-Aid. A time when clowns were kings, when saints were sinners, cops were criminals, and a wise man often played the fool.
A word to the wise: don’t try this in your century.
Today’s remix version:
Release version:
[A note on this track. With drums, bass, keyboards, and found audio, this is a very different track for AYoS, more typical of my ‘band’ work with one blue nine. It does not represent a new change in direction for AYoS, although I have started sneaking a few more elements into the simple acoustic versions I’ve been recording daily. Honest to gosh… I just lost track of the time and wasn’t able to record a new acoustic track. (Yeah, yeah. It shouldn’t take more than 5 or 6 minutes, I realize. But it does.) And then my cable net connection completely disappeared in the middle of uploading this track… Anyhow, it’s done. I didn’t add it to the now very long playlist of AYoS Radio, since I thought the sudden shift to a full band might be jarring in that context. Always thinking of you, gentle readers and listeners. Heh.]