Around1

'The Black Album'

This album is about a woman I love.

Who's been pissing me off lately.

Her name is America.

And it all began - somewhat accidentally - with the writing of the first track on the album, 'Around1.'

Take a sad song and make it sadder

'Around1' started as a goof on a co-worker from the day job named Rudy. The Beatles' 'Hey Jude' transformed to a party sing-along called 'Hey Rude.' With l'il ol me on guitar.

But I started to vamp on the end. To blues it up.

To black it up.

A few days later, I wanted to turn my now unrecognizable end of 'Hey Jude' into something of my own. Hadn't written anything in a long ass time, seemed right.

(And a little too perfect: according to my parents, 'Hey Jude' is the first song I really fell in love with. Singing along with all of the 'nah-nah's' at the end in the back seat of the car as a toddler.)

So I blurted out a melody:

"I wanna testify that she's been fucking around."

Where did that come from? The bluesy nature of the riff? Maybe.

But there it is. A cheating lover song.

You got your opening line now, kid, so how you gonna fill in the blanks?

Quickly, just to get going, that's how. 90 percent is the re-write anyway, right?

A thought: maybe have it ready for the next Larkin show? A deadline. Forcing myself to write.

Because writers write. Or some such bullshit.

It still feels a little empty. Maybe I need a rap in the middle, some spoken word. Some sense of humor to deflate the nastiness.

Hmmmm... cheating lover... rap... humor.

So over a breakdown in the middle of the song, I start riffing Prince's 'Bob George,' from The Black Album. The quintessential cheating lover rap.

New coat huh? It's nice.

Did u buy it?

Yeah, right.

U seein' that rich mother fucker again!

I'm laughing to myself as I'm saying it.

I pay the rent in this raggedy mother fucker and all u do is suck up food and heat!

It's a brilliant, brilliant song. Not so much a song as a 4 minute one-man-show. Off-off Broadway. A comedy tour-de-force. Half Richard Pryor, half George Clinton. Dark, dark hilarity.

But as I'm going on, I'm saying to myself: well, this is a quick fix to have the song ready for the Larkin show, buys me some time to come up with my own funny rap middle section - but there is no way I can improve on Prince's 'Bob George.'

It works well with the song I'm writing, but it's too good. It's overshadowing the song.

Still I plod on. Get past the verse where he has the police at bay, and makes a bold phone call to the 'rich mother fucker' his lady's been seeing on the side - Bob George.

Just as I'm about to say "Is Mr. George there?" - it changes.

A deep breath:

Is MR. GEORGE W. BUSH there?

And then the next line, unadulterated:

This is your conscience, mother fucker!

So there's the angle: the cheating lover is America.

And the rest pretty much wrote itself.

Because see, it was late February 2003. Bombs were about to fall. For all of the wrong reasons. And with no real plan.

And at the time, to say that it was for all the wrong reasons and with no real plan was tantamount to treason.

To even raise questions about the reasons or the plans was tantamount to treason.

And come July, I would have a daughter who was going to need to have all of this explained to her.

How we got into this mess her generation is going to have to clean up.

How we squandered the sympathies and goodwill of an entire planet.

I kept up having the spoken word as part of the middle section, even though the rest of the song wasn't finished.

Cheating lover America became cheating lover prostitute America.

Much of it was written in the shower.

I find it's a great way to hide the tears.

The boy in the radio plastic bubble

One day, I put the guitar down during a rehearsal to help with memorizing the spoken word section. Never picked it up again. It just felt right to do the spoken word without the guitar at all. As a separate piece.

And so 'Around2' was born.

Didn't come back to what's now called 'Around1' until a few weeks later.

It was only half finished, so I retooled it so that it made more sense as the America metaphor.

Without being too blatantly political. I'm not much for blatantly political tunes. Naming names and stuff.

After all, a Democrat will disappoint you just as soon as a Republican. A conservative will disappoint you just as soon as a liberal.

Reminds me of some moderate conservative talking head I saw on TV the other night, railing against the media elite because they're stuck in a "bubble" of experience that colors their reporting.

Look: EVERYONE'S in a bubble.

Media, schmedia.

I'm in a bubble. You're in a bubble.

Everyone.

To get super-pretentious on that ass, from Eliot's notes to the Waste Land:

F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346: "My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul."

So for me, politics is petty. It's prisons. It's bubbles.

A song needs something larger to work for me - yet in some ways smaller - to make it timeless.

To make it human.

It's the humanity behind the politics that I want to tackle.

So I kept 'Around1' short, and super simple.

And in my mind, both versions of 'Around' are ultimately about more than the events of 2003. They're about 200+ years of messing around, 200+ years of us as a nation saying one thing and doing another.

Again.

And again.

And again.

So I'm pointing the finger at all of us, as Americans, for collective hypocrisy.

Myself included.

And you, too.

Gotta recognize it in yourself before you indict anyone else, I say.

So how's it end?

But there was still the issue of the final verse.

How to end it?

Well, how about with the little girl who's coming in July?

More lines written in the shower.