Thursday, can we dim the lights?

Is This Interesting?
Thoughts/feelings that just might not matter:

May comes to a close today, and we are almost halfway done with 2007. Seems like such a fresh year to be so old.

Matt the Electrician and I had a great time at Café Mundi last night with a fine crowd of listeners. I experienced one of those odd moments as a singer/songwriter when I had to do some editing after starting a song without thinking.

I’ve got this tune Sewing Machine, which appears on my CD, Bedroom Demos Vol. 1: Zero Demand. It’s about becoming accustomed to, fond of, and dependent on emotional and physical abuse. Not usually a fertile field for fun folk-pop songs, but I think I pulled it off alright, and it’s damn fun to play.

So I start it off with the first verse, “You could run my lips through a sewing machine…”
Second verse, “You could push my hands through a shredding device…”
Third, “You could force my heart ‘cross a cheese grater blade…”

It was right about there, in that third verse that I remembered the content of the fourth:

“You could ring my neck with a tightly wound noose
And I’d still find a reason to hope for a truce
Yes, hope is a thread that’s just broken loose
Somewhere at the top of that tightly wound noose.”

Well, if you’ve been watching the news, you know that there was an awful murder-suicide in Texas involving a depressed mother hanging herself and her four children. Only an eight-month-old child survived.

It’s an awful thing to think about, especially at a light-hearted acoustic show, so I decided to leave the verse out just before I actually sang it. I recalled feeling similarly strange about it back when Saddam Hussein was hanged months ago.

I thought I was writing about something archaic that you only see in westerns, something that never happens, like someone getting their lips sewn together. I guess I was wrong. Folks have often called my songs weird and twisted, but dang it all, the world out there always has me beat.

God bless those poor children.

Remind me to tell you about my song Tokyo causing earthquakes in Japan.

Quotopia
Freshly-picked quotes from the ol’ reference collection: