It’s the end of the year, and time for reflection, and perhaps a dose of humility. So I’m in the mood to make a belated apology.
A lot of the time, it’s just not clear where some of my songs come from. For instance, consider “Your Side of the Bed”. This is a farcical song about how relationships recapitulate the history of colonialism. I have absolutely no idea what inspired it, and my notes show that it started out in a very different place than it finished – the central metaphor wasn’t present at all in the original idea. I place myself in the hands of the muse, some days.
Sometimes, however, the inspiration is clear as a bell, and not necessarily a tribute to my honesty or good behavior. As I told you a while back, before I married my delightful wife, I dated a woman who had a profound impact on my artistic side. Let’s call her Island Girl. My relationship with Island Girl yielded at least four songs – that is, at least four songs I’m willing to admit I wrote. They are, in chronological order, “Onset Bay”, “Big Bertha”, “Atlantis”, and “Just A Couple Steps Ahead of Me”. The first two are on an early, vanity compilation called Entering Harmony, which pains my wife to listen to because it was clear at that time that I couldn’t sing my way out of a paper bag (or a cassette case, for that matter); the second two are on the first and second disks of Life is Like a River. In other words, from your point of view, early stuff.
Island Girl tested my limits, challenged my expectations, and my relationship with her was not in my comfort zone, not at all. I knew this, and I wrote about it at the beginning. “Onset Bay” was written only a couple months after we met, and you can see the problem right away:
And in the morning when it’s time to leave
The island holds its breath and the water’s still
You say that you’ll believe if I believe
I say that I’ll believe if you will
Yep, it was a relationship on probation, for more than three years. Don’t get me wrong; I adored Island Girl, and still care for her deeply. But it should have been clear to me, much earlier, that my rubber band didn’t stretch that far.
We had some lovely, memorable times. For example, her precious, sly mutt that I wrote about in my column “Must Like Dogs” turns up in “Big Bertha”, which was written one afternoon during a hurricane on Island Girl’s farm. And she continues to impress me with her faith and fortitude; “Just a Couple Steps Ahead of Me” was written after we broke up, and it’s essentially an admission of my own limitations. But the one that sticks in my craw is “Atlantis”.
Go read the lyrics. You’ll see a story essentially about a relationship that has no common ground:
Can’t breathe the water
Can’t drink the air
Can’t keep the life from oozing slowly out of this doomed affair
Don’t dare continue
Can’t bear to quit
We can live in Atlantis
I’m sure of it
Now, this should come as no surprise; I wrote it right after I broke up with her, and the reasons I broke up with her were very clear to me. But – here’s the humiliating part – at the time, I had absolutely no clue that this song was about us. Really. I thought to myself, “Here’s a cool metaphor, let me write a song about it”. The fact that it was about the breakup escaped me entirely.
I don’t need to be self-aware all the time. But ignorance has its pitfalls. Here’s what I did: I played the song for her. She came up to visit me, and I thought, “I’ve got a great new song”, and I played it for her. And she started to cry. And I had no idea why she was crying. Because I’m an idiot.
Island Girl is reading this, almost certainly. I never apologized to her for that awful time that I dropped that dead bird on her doorstep, but today I will: I was astonishingly thick-headed and bizarrely dense, and I’m sorry.
Happy holidays, everybody.