My new feature Song Stories goes into a little background about one of the songs I’ve written. This month’s Song Story, fittingly enough, is about “A Bigger Glass of Empty”.
I’m a pretty lucky guy: healthy, smart, talented, great job, adoring spouse, comfortable home. So when it’s time to “write what you know”, as the old saying goes, sometimes I can, well, be a little strapped for tragedy, if you know what I mean. A couple years ago, I ran completely dry. Every song idea I came up with was either stupid, or overly simplistic, or something I couldn’t relate to at all, or something that had been done over and over again and I had nothing new to say about. Or a combination of all of those things. I love writing songs, and not having anything to write about made me feel like I was in handcuffs.
So one day, I was sitting around feeling sorry for myself, and feeling stupid about feeling sorry for myself – it wasn’t like I was starving or dying of cancer, for heaven’s sake, I just couldn’t write a damn song. And so, believe it or not, I started feeling sorry for myself for not being able to identify with a suitably tragic circumstance – only a songwriter could get his knickers into that sort of twist. But lo, there, in the darkness and gloom of upper-middle-class comfort, it hit me: I’d never heard a song about someone feeling sorry for himself for not being able to feel sorry for himself!
And the rest is history. My copious notes suggest that the song pretty much wrote itself in a day or so. It’s become one of my most requested songs. I think to many listeners, it plays out as a simple ode to humility, but it really is something more: the path to humility for the speaker isn’t a particularly noble one: “But I’ve got woes I’m too ashamed to mention…” Never let it be said that I let my protagonists off easy.