Kinda a Remix

When I was twenty, I wrote what I called, rather tongue-in-cheek, "The Romantic Song."  I would play it quietly on guitar and feel that it showed a jaded wisdom about women, despite my inarguable inexperience.  It was one of the first songs that I wrote that I was pleased enough with that I hinted to a friend that I had a song I wanted to play him.  Embarrassed, I played it softly and he looked away and listened until I was done, and then said that it was ok (I mean, *HE* couldn't write a song), but that me singing it for him to hear was kinda gay, didn't I think, even though it was about trying to get with women.  

Sadly, with only slight tweaking of the lyrics, it still represents my romantic experience to this day, twenty years later.  I always thought it was pretty boring, and a friend who specializing in putting groove into acoustic songs heard my most elaborate, instrument-filled version and just said it didn't work, and that it lacked groove.  As I have done before, when I can't seem to make a song have a groove to it, I take it more blank, more sad, more quiet, more simple.  I thought of the stuff Johnny Cash did before his death, particularly the beat from "God's Gonna Cut You Down" (which has a blank almost anti-groove groove to it) and did an extremely simple, sad version of it, just singing and playing the guitar to a drum loop while sitting on my futon, then adding bass.  No doubling of the guitar, no playing and singing separately.  I hid an almost secret harmony vocal in it, and it all seemed to be better than the one with all the stuff in it.  Because I was trying to make it so very sad, I put "sad trombone" from www.sadtrombone.com at the beginning.  Then I put it on my web page.

This weekend, after watching Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges playing and singing sad country songs, I hunted through my samples, found some timpani (kettle drums, like in the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey) and hid them in bits of the song, and also hid a string quartet.  I was more indulgent with the reverb, and pushed the lower end more to make it more ponderous and foreboding, and I like it better.  It's not perfect, but it has a mood now.  It's here.  I will likely never know if a single person on earth has ever heard it, let alone has ever felt like that.