Songs of Love, Hate, Passion and Regret

Written about a foreign exchange student I dated during my junior year in high school. Despite the circumstances, I knew she was the one and we were going to live happily ever after. Needless to say, it didn’t work-out and I became unreasonably bitter about the whole thing. This song is my fantasy that she would some day come crawling back to me and I wouldn’t be so sure that I’d be able to resist taking her back.

This one is related to the foreign exchange student I dated in high school as well. This song was our song, but it was the version that UB40 recorded in 1993. The song book I used for the guitar lessons I’d taken years before included the song so I decided to cover it in an angrily humorous sort of way. If I remember correctly, I recorded myself following along on the pages probably only the second or third time I tried it and you can hear a stumble at one point as I’m flipping the sheet. All these years later, I have a hard time keeping the timeline straight, but I’m pretty sure she came back to visit her host family in the winter or summer of 1995 and I played it for her and she thought it was good.

For the last two weeks of 1998, I stayed at my friend’s place in Oberlin, Ohio, where I met a Russian student who lived with him and was attending the Conservatory. She and I would spend long periods of time sitting in her room, chain smoking while we stared into each other’s eyes, without speaking because we didn’t speak each other’s language. This song was inspired by her during that visit.

After my visit with my friend in Oberlin, I returned to Athens to work at the famous Burrito Buggy and noticed I was working with someone new. I remember I was reading a copy of “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts, which the Russian girl had given me for Christmas, when the new girl came in. The new girl showed-up and was anything but Zen. After a few weeks, we started hanging-out after work, and I wouldn’t get home until the sun was fully up, but I didn’t feel like sleeping. Most of the tracks on the Maximum Strength collection, including this one, were recorded on little to no sleep first thing in the morning after my roommate went to school. This one was supposed to reflect her manic behavior and at the end I’m mentioning a road trip to Chicago that we never took.

In the early fall of 1999, I moved into an empty room in an old house in Oberlin with the Russian girl. This one was about her.

In the spring of 2001, I got a job in Akron and for the first couple of months spent the week in Akron and the weekends back in Oberlin getting ready to move. The relationship with the Russian girlfriend had been terminally on the edge of falling apart, but the time away in Akron rekindled things to a certain extent so when it came time to move there for good she came along with me. Things quickly disintegrated and when she got accepted to graduate school in Vancouver, I did my best to get her on her way. We maintained something over the phone for about 4 or 5 months until it finally ended. This song wasn’t written until a year later, but it still ended-up one of my best songs and arguably the best lyric I ever wrote. This song still makes me sad after all these years.

The music and sentiment of “Remember When” was written well over a year before I met the person who finished it off. The lyrics were about remembering a moment where the light of the moon illuminated the wall next to a bed and I realized I was living in a moment of time that was moving so quickly that despite my efforts to make sure I was experiencing it as fully as possible I knew it was already slipping away and the whole thing would end in a sad way. (“Union & Parkwood” was recorded three years earlier but I spliced it in after “Remember When” because I liked how it went along so well with it.)

This is the last song I wrote that was the result of some crazy passion for another person, but it was written after it was all over. The night before it had been laid-out for me and in the morning I came to terms with being alone again, and, sitting in bed with my guitar, this just jumped out of me. I immediately got dressed and drove to my studio to record a demo, which is this recording and still my favorite version despite it all being half-baked.  The person called me up while I was at the studio wrapping up and asked me over. I played the recording for her and she was really excited about it and things went on for another week or so, I think, but eventually ended.