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The words that I could never say [She’d Be Mine]

She'd Be Mine

He never realized he was going to leave until one night when he left.

They’d been together forever, through most of high school, after. She took some classes at a local college, he picked up construction work. And it was all ok with him. But he knew she wanted more. She wouldn’t say it. She wouldn’t ask. But he knew. And he wouldn’t give it.

He couldn’t.

That’s what he believed and that’s what he planned on believing his whole life.

He left a message on his boss’s machine, threw some clothes in a duffle bag and told his mom to pick up his last check. And he took off.

It was probably a year and a half before he’d let himself come home to visit his mother — and then only when she had a health scare.

He’d been traveling, picking up work, bumming around. He was out of the habits of society. He visited his mother for a few days until he was convinced his little brother had things under control and his mother was getting better and then he headed back out to a pipeline construction project he had a line on. A guy could make enough in two months to travel for a year, if he played it right.

Then his mom did get sick and he went home. His little brother was falling apart, trying to work and take care of mom. He stowed his duffle in a closet and took over his mother’s care, patiently nursing her back toward a health she would never completely reclaim.

He stayed around the house most of the day, seldom going out, but, later, when his brother was home, often after everyone else had gone to sleep, he would go out, walking through the darkened, now strangely unfamiliar streets of his hometown.

One afternoon his mother needed a change of medicine. He took the bus to a pharmacy far away from his neighborhood. It was in the new subdivisions where the soy fields used to be. He hoped that by going there he would be avoiding old memories — and the possibility of a chance encounter.

But he read somewhere that we’re drawn irresistably, mysteriously toward that which we fear most.

He was sipping bitter coffee in front of a chain coffee shop when he saw her.

He really felt like his heart stopped.

She was loading a couple of kids in an older, white Volve. She looked only a few moments older but the kids were maybe two and three; he was no good with kids, guessing ages, that kind of thing. They made him nervous and apprehensive. But these kids were different. They were beautiful. He felt instantly protective, as though he was a distant, but all-seeing guardian angel.

And she… she was so hearbreakingly lovely. The sunlight came through tall, crooked rows of eucalyptus and lit her hair.

He sipped the coffee, its cool, acrid rasp on the back of his throat. He pulled his head down a little bit. But he knew he didn’t have to. He knew he was already invisible.

previous AYoS version

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 threw 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

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25 Guitars

25 Guitars

Southern California has more washed up stars than Mexican and Thai restaurants combined. Any AA or NA meeting is going to have at least an Emmy or Grammy winner or two and maybe an Oscar winner, ya never know.

Most of them had an orderly descent from the firmament, cushioned by gradually fading popularity, side jobs, new careers.

But the idea that grabbed me from the very first line out of my mouth as I wrote this song (“Go back home and tell all the kids / this is what it’s like when your hero hits the skids”) was a guy who suddenly seemed to just snap, throwing away or losing everything almost overnight.

As I saw the protagonist (AYoS fans will be nodding their heads knowingly, they can see it coming now), he had doomed himself by abandoning the girl back home in his ambition and lust for adventure. (What? You were thinking his business manager embezzled all his dough?)

I wanted to capture that tractionless, slow-mo panic as everyday chores become herculean challenges and doubt erodes the most basic presumptions. I also wanted to give expression to my estimation of the moral depth of the music business in LA.

It’s worth noting — as I think there’s room for unintended interpretation in these lines — with the reference to a “noose” I was looking to suggest a phantasmagoric public execution — against the expected context of suicide. To me, the “bottom dropping out” is the trap door in the gallows. He laughs the whole way down because it’s such a relief when he finally quits trying to hold his life together.

And — at the risk of overexplaining (oops, too late) when he wakes up in the gutter and he’s dreaming that he dreamed he threw it all away — he’s not really talking about the condo and the 25 guitars.

25 Guitars

Go back home and
tell all the kids
this is what it’s like
when their hero hits the skids

go out to the farm and
tell my ma and pa
the higher you climb
the farther you must fall

I started out thinking
that I’d always know the score
now I hardly know
what I was counting for

I lost my one true love
my agent and my car
my condo and my dog
and twenty five guitars

but baby I was lost before
I ever got to town
I threw the map away
the day I let you down

yeah I hit the big time
but the big time it hits back
and all the way up
I was looking back

Wake me up and say its all a dream
we could drink coffee and talk about what it all means
I dreamed I dreamed I threw it all away
If I could just wake up back in your arms today

I was on the fat side of heaven
how come it felt like hell
each day was a struggle
one day I just fell

The bottom dropped out
I laughed the whole way down
with a noose around yer neck
LA is a much nicer town

Wake me up and say its all a dream
we could drink coffee and talk about what it all means
I dreamed I dreamed I threw it all away
If I could just wake up back in your arms today

Go back home and tell all the kids
this is what it’s like when their hero hits the skids

(C)1997, TK Major

 

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