{"id":563,"date":"2006-02-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-03T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/inside_baseball\/2006\/02\/03\/song-stories-4\/"},"modified":"2006-02-03T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-03T05:00:00","slug":"song-stories-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/03\/song-stories-4\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bigger Glass of Empty"},"content":{"rendered":"

My new feature Song Stories<\/em> 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”<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-low-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}