I remember hearing The Smiths for the first time. It was in a record store when vinyl was on the wane, cassettes were on top and CDs were gaining popularity.
It was "This Charming Man." I wasn't sure what it was about exactly, but it sounded so different than what I was used to hearing on the radio that I immediately wanted to hear more.
Many years later, I started playing guitar and writing songs of my own. The Smiths always had sort of a handmade feeling. Not raw like punk, but not slick like the normal radio pop songs the DJs constantly played that said "nothing to me about my life."
I wanted very much to make a song that sounded raw and intelligent and funny and swinging, like The Smiths at their best.
I liked all of their albums, but for me "Louder than Bombs" was their best because it felt B-side-ish, which I think it was to some extent. I listened to it probably too loud on whatever passed for headphones back when I was in high school, and "Rubber Ring" still speaks to me just as clearly and passionately as it did back then. (Click the link to read Jake Brown's post from 2003. Can that year be right? Wow.)
I had been traveling for work more than usual, and I noticed sometimes you would sit next to someone fairly chatty who confided in you maybe as a stranger more than they would someone they actually knew. Or maybe I was that person.
In the final days of a failing company
A business man sat on the plane next to me
He said there'd been questions, irregularities,
Still he'd never done anything knowingly illegal
He met a girl when he was twenty one
He never quite got her face out of his mind
He looked her up lately and her life had come undone
And maybe she'd be happy now to see him
I remember those two verses coming easily. Then the chorus, which sounds overly dramatic but also true.
It's a desperate grasp to find anything that lasts
It's a desperate grasp to find anything that lasts
It's a desperate grasp to find anything that lasts
Longer than a young girl's smile...
I thought it would be funny for someone to tell secrets in his sleep, but instead of a lover's name, etc., it would be formulas for making a proprietary plastic.
He nodded off and he spoke in his sleep
Reciting formulas from memory
Exotic plastics and dense French poetry
In an accent that was hauntingly familiar...
When it came to the bridge, I used a snapped off piece of progression that I had made a year or more before trying to imitate part of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World." Actually, it was Nirvana's cover version. I used a noise/synth app on my phone to do the little solo.
We landed and we walked up the gate
He was heading for the city and running late
He turned to me with pain in his eyes
He said "I hope you lead a life without compromise."
Sort of like a charming man who has made his share of mistakes trying to help a stranger not make the same questionable decisions.
