Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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“All That’s True” was a passive act of collaboration.

I have this friend Gina who i’ve been friends with ever since i finally escaped my Born Again grade school in 1994. She was the reason i started to do theatre, and the reason i started to play guitar – because she’s always made both things look so incredibly effortless. One thing i started on my own was songwriting, because Gina was never one with much of a bent towards lyrical writing. When i wrote my first song i was too awful at guitar playing to write the music so she wrote it for me and then taught it to me. The next year she wrote one of her first sets of lyrics, and they were amazing, but she never really did anything with them. So, in the summer of 1999 i was up late one night doing nothing and i had just gotten into the tuning FADGCF, which is now one of my favourites. I was playing around with the tuning, which lets you play lots of nice open C and F chords, and i happened to be trolling through my Netscape email for snippets of lyrics that had been left by the wayside, and one thing lead to another and “All That’s True” got written. Gina still doesn’t know how to play it, but if she comes over later i’ll teach her. Here are the lyrics:

If a rose bloomed in winter would it be a strange sight/ what if it had blue petals/ and only bloomed at night/ do you think it still would be called a rose/ if it didn’t smell as sweet/ I think instead, they’d just rename it/ and sell it on the street, because//

Everything’s for sale today, just like it was before/ and tomorrow there’ll be something new that’ll make it all worth more/ in the end, it’s all worth nothing/ if it means nothing to you/ but that’s okay if the money’s made/ ’cause that is all that’s true/ // /

I wonder what would happen if I went back/ to when all the cave men were here/ I wonder what would happen if I took two rocks/ and discovered fire and decided to call it air/ do you think that I’d be famous/ would they draw me on a cave wall/ do you think they’d give me their barter/ so I could profit from it all//

Everything’s for sale today, just like it was before/ and tomorrow there’ll be something new that’ll make it all worth more/ in the end, it’s all worth nothing/ if it means nothing to you/ but that’s okay if the money’s made/ ’cause that is all that’s true/ // /

If a rose bloomed in winter/ would they sell it on TV/ and for 49.95/ could i get a second one for free/ do you think by any other name/ it would smell as sweet/ or would it just be another flower/ sold off the corner of the street//

Everything’s for sale today, just like it was before/ and tomorrow there’ll be something new that’ll make it all worth more/ in the end, it’s all worth nothing/ if it means nothing to you/ but that’s okay if the money’s made/ ’cause that is all that’s true/ // / Everything’s for sale today, just like it was before/ and tomorrow there’ll be something better that will cost you so much more/ it’s all worth nothing in the end/ worth nothing to you/ but they can make their money/ if we can keep our right to choose

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4782261/

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This tiny trouble finally got the best of you and made a nest in your heart and a lump in your throat, and all that you possess will never mean as much to you as that one small chance you missed. And it’s nagging at your heels just like a dog trying to chew up the cover over what went wrong, because your excuses will expire eventually. Tiny creeping wrinkles tucked into the corners of your eyes – a simple smile does not constitute a suitable disguise. A flick of the wrist, a wrinkle of your nose won’t fix this – although we all watch Bewitched sometimes. But no magic act can change the fact that you got hung up on so fast phone’s in the cradle as fast as your able to get it down on the table.

You set the alarm for 5am just so you can get up with the sun as if the brightness it brings can drown out the din of all the worries your done in for. You take the keys so so careful there’s no sound and drive around until you pass the playground, but it’s too early for children to appreciated it so you sit on a swing and you contemplate the situation. Cause mourning doesn’t hold all the answers and it keeps picking at you a little faster and you use your feet to drag to a stop. But what will you tell them? What will they say? You put your hands into your pockets and you’re so afraid. Days will go by and you’re still be waiting just inhaling and exhaling that air that contains you because you’re so afraid to dilate to open up to anyone.

So, back in your room at 6am, not a moment too soon for you. You close the door, turn the key so nobody can and pull that letter out of the drawer. To you it reads “don’t bother trying anymore,” but you rip it to shreds. And go back to bed

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4781973/

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So, should i be talking about the songs? I suppose talking about them is the way to get to know me over the course of the day, right? I still don’t know where “This Tiny Trouble” came from – i know i had just been working on a song called “Up & Down” because my guitar was tuned really low, and i tuned it to what would’ve been EADF#BD if it hadn’t been tuned so low, and i found that funny little simple riff, and then it came to me that i was singing about some kind of tiny trouble nipping at someone’s heels. It was a strange song to write because i didn’t know at any point how it would end … it was like the story was using me to write it rather my using the story to write a song. I finally finished it with that somewhat open ending, which felt like a bit of a cop-out because it didn’t say anything about what was happening in the song. It wasn’t until last month that i realized i had been writing the song about an entirely real person and the reason i left the ending open was because i wasn’t sure what was going to happen to her. I still don’t quite know what the ending will be, but i really wish she got to hear the song i unintentionally wrote for her, so that’s why it’s first. I wrote a song for her intentionally which you’ll hear later.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4781734/

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When i was little i used to love 45’s. For those of you who are my age but lacked musically enthusiastic parents, 45’s were vinyl record singles. The number ’45’ referred to the speed that you’d play them at on your record player. Back in the 80’s, they made record players for children… little FisherPrice affairs done up in child-safe plastic with absolutely no edges. Back when Woodland Avenue used to be a place you could actually go shopping my mom and i would take a trip around the corner every week or two to go to the music store, and i netted quite a few 45’s in the process. I have happy memories of “We Built This City” and my mother’s old copy of “Bungle in the Jungle” and some random Expose song that i’ll always associate with the smell of baby powder because when i first listened to it i had just taken a shower and i was sitting on my blue rug smelling like baby power.

The cool thing about 45’s is that they had an A side and a B side to them … the single was on the A-side of the record, and some other song would be on the B-side. Singles now-a-days don’t really have the same kind of dynamic – they’re all mostly just remixes and radio edits. But, in the 80’s B-sides were fun; they’d be a track from the album that would further entice you to buy it, or sometimes the instrumental version of a song (like the B-side for “La Isla Bonita”). However, the most special kind of B-sides were songs that weren’t found anywhere on the album that the song was released from, and today that’s what a B-side is when people refer to artists like Tori Amos or Garbage. So, today there are 25 primary songs for you to aim your ears at, but also 25 B-sides that aren’t necessarily from this little adventure, but for you all the same. Enjoy.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4781366/