Recorded: 2005
Lyrics
If music makes you feel like you're better than everybody else
that wouldn't be good,, never could be good?
Can anybody make money off my songs?,, with this much time,, with this much taste!
tell me if that's good,, can't see if that's good...
I can't decide if it's for my own therapy,, I could've been peddling long ago
is that good?
You know I don't wanna insult you,, I set out to make songs that never insult anyone!...
I went to the church // I couldn't stand as high
I will not live in anybody else's mind but my own...
Keep me out of your magazines,, you should not put me in the magazines,, you should not
I wouldn't specifically pursue being on the news when I did something bad and didn't wanna get caught (I need to fall back on something),,
but that's just the difference between me and you,, I wouldn't get myself in your place... (I think I need to fall back on something)
No I can't decide if it's for my own therapy,, I could've been peddlin' long ago...
I'm just not trying to be anybody's friend!
(not trying to get anywhere)
BackStory
this is a thorny one... in the summer of '04 Alex and I decided to get back to our roots and spend most weekends on tripping things... (The most significant of songs that came from these sessions was 'Blank Sheet' after becoming haunted by the sense that behind the universe was nothing// no gears// no god,, ...just a blank white sheet that I was beginning to see up in the sky) --
One night I made the cliche mistake of thinking the mushrooms may not be strong enough and downed an extra dose... I went downstairs with the bouzouki our violinist had left in my garage (that really made songs like 'erosion blues') and started 4-tracking with the few lyrics I'd jotted down... I made it through the first verse and things were sounding pretty good but then my mind began to totally detach and drift away from the guitar, the song and it's meaning --
As a strange feeling was overtaking me, the act of recording the song started to become pretty irrelevant and I began to get into the lyrics more and more and more,, scribbling away on little memo pad pages and ripping them out as I went... these began to cover the floor and eventually covered every square inch of the entire basement as I couldn't seem to run out of ideas... sometimes the pages would just be one line that encapsulated a seemingly massive discovery in my mind... and, as usual, when going back to some of the diatribes the next day I could barely understand what they meant... I'm pretty sure a lot of these ripped out pages are still buried behind the box my four-track still sits on... I've already searched around a little bit for the picture someone took the next day of the ripped pages covering the entire basement floor surrounding the four-track but it's nowhere! and it's pissing me off that I'll never see it again...
Obviously there was an enormous well of total bitterness waiting inside my psyche that had accumulated from the 90's and the feeling that I would never break thru the wall of complete and utter evil bullshit in the world of music culture and get to a point where I could just make records and get them out blah blah... that bitterness definitely lurks the song, but the mushrooms made it all turn inside out... so that the meaning of the lyric bounces back and forth thru different perspectives that work to mock my situation... trying to deflate/empower the ego and destroy//exalt the bitterness (not sure which one)... when re-recording it later I'm not sure I knew exactly what some of the lines really meant... -as tripping will do,, you feel empowered to the point that you are one with the most powerful force and are not afraid of anything... making you capable of making fun of yourself as a separate entity (see the introduction to Be Here Now by Ram Dass)... this seemed like a great way to approach a song...
Part of the gist is basically that we are helpless to a world of solipsism in the end when determining our own values... as if I was telling myself that there's nothing beyond my own apprehension of artistic success (and turning away from the daily bile-inducing habit of seeing the machinations of fame as a process destroying people's ability to think on their own terms etc.)...
Around that time this really weird case was in the news in Portland everyday where the killer of these two girls had gone on TV to talk about them (before he'd been accused) in some bizarre attempt to get famous...
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Weaver_III
...somehow my mind latched onto his strange compulsion to get famous in the face of committing heinous crimes... regardless,, I bet the line "I wouldn't specifically pursue being on the news when I did something bad and didn't wanna get caught..." might've made it into the song anyway for the amount of baggage I'd already had about the search for affirmation from others...
"I would've sold myself but I felt ashamed..."
-Fred Neil
