18/24 - touch / under my skin (demo)
by admin
bthon'01
“Punk” happened one day, and i can’t really say it any way other than that. One day i was sitting in this very chair at this very computer having a conversation about not having very much of a voice back in highschool, and the next think i knew i was writing this song. I really didn’t have much of a voice in highschool… i was the loud and obnoxious one, and i had opinions, but i don’t know if i ever said what i felt and i know even less whether or not anyone was even listening. “Punk” is deceptively punk-rock and upbeat… maybe in highschool we all wanted to be a punk band, but it’s just the spirit of it that stuck around.
So, wow, doing requests by the light of dawn is pretty fun, but you can hear the weariness creeping into my voice. None of the requests are going to debut until we’re back into the PM hours, so don’t get too excited.
I’ve let quite a few songs drift by without much commentary. “Goodbye” is not just some random blues lament; it’s really about losing one of my friends to their enamourment with drugs. College cut me off from them before i could hear how it turned out and they’re still alive now so i hope all is well, but when i left them they were doing things a bit more than was healthy. I am honestly okay with all sorts of recreational drug use, but (for example) using cocaine is over the line of what i consider “recreation” and i basically made that clear not as an ultimatum but as a concern. And i was ignored. So, eventually, “Goodbye” was the result. Somewhere along the way it absorbed its siamese twin of a song “Fearless,” which was the same emotion attached to someone wholly different … basically, i was watching the movie Fearless and it has a very graphic plain-crash scene in it twice, and i had just lost someone in a crash two summers before, and it just brought all of the emotions crashing down on my head and then i was in my hallway crying for a while, and then “Fearless” happened. Both are the same thing… saying goodbye without ever wanting to.
“Never Say Goodbye” is the polar opposite in too many ways other than its name to count. First of all, it involves the conscious decision to never let go of a friend despite of something separating us because that something wasn’t final like addiction or death; it was just space. I don’t write songs consciously very often – that is, i don’t usually pick an emotion and then run with it – but in this case i had the intent and i had the opening line and the song happened. “NSG” is probably the most-editted of all of my songs, and i have three drafts worth of RealAudio to prove it. But, anyhow, it was a great success on my demo so i’ve been leaving it alone lately to give it a bit of a break.
eek, time for another shower or some caffeine pills…