For some reason, I love confederate soldiers and they pop up frequently into my imagination.* Obviously, the south was in the wrong, but still I tend to think that the soldiers did not fight alone, but had fairies fighting with them side by side. Why would fairies fight for the Confederate army? I don’t know. My best guess is that they wanted the south to remain agricultural and undeveloped, so that they would have a place to live and their societies and cultures would not be destroyed. But in the end, they were. It is strange how even in the most black and white circumstances, there will always be more to the picture than we can see.
It is nearly impossible for me to sing this song all the way through without screaming “NOOOoooo!!!!” and throwing down my guitar to hide my head in a pillow. It just embarrasses me to no end. It makes me feel like a cheesy, greasy guy driving around in a convertible and tank top, whistling at the ladies. Not that I dislike oily men, btw, I just don’t feel comfortable BEING one myself.
But James thinks I should include All my songs on this blog- The Complete Set- and I try to do as I’m told. Anyway, you can’t go through life just slashing out all the things you don’t know how to appreciate. I used to live that way, and now I really wish I could get my tie-dyed Iron Maiden t-shirt back. It was beautiful.
This song is more or less a true story, except that my husband never passed out from moonshine, it was a blend of vodka and wormwood extract. He did fall face first onto his plate of turkey, but the joke was on me and the other guests who must have been out of our minds as well, since it took us a while to realize that the turkey we were eating was still frosty and raw.
I got married (the first time) because God told my husband-to-be that I had to. This wasn’t the first time God had spoken to this man (let’s call him John). It started when God told John he had been appointed as my spiritual guide. Next, God told John I needed to give John my two favorite shirts. One for John to keep and one for John to give to a girl he liked (we’ll call her Sally). This hurt, because I really liked those two shirts, and I didn’t see why a man would want to wear purple velvet anyway.
After that, things started to snowball rapidly. I had to tell my friends I was in love with him (for complex spiritual reasons that I cannot remember). I had to go on a spiritual retreat with him. He drove me to Michigan which turned out to be where his parents lived and I was introduced to them as his girlfriend. I was horrified but didn’t know how to contradict him. Before he drove me home I was required to be engaged to him. Because God had needed me- as part of the spiritual retreat- to see him naked, and now that I had seen him naked his spirituality required him to marry me.
This was horrifying. I was a student and the very idea of seeing whiskers from up-close was still revolting to me. Plus, I had been hoping to marry Bono one day and live with him in his castle. But I didn’t know what to do. I tried to hide my ring finger because I felt so ashamed. But people would see the ring and congratulate me. I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt. So many people were fiercely loyal to him and no one cared about me in more than a “hey, let’s go to a party together” way.
And then, once we were engaged, John told me he had to give Sally a naked massage for existential reasons.
When I was living in Gomorrah (Beverly Hills), a friend and I went out to for a drink. She was an unnaturally wise friend, and as we were walking to the bar she kept instructing me “Just say no. Whatever the question is, the answer is no.” Next thing I remember, I was drunk and hungry and a nice man was inviting us to his house for some homemade pasta with a little side of cocaine. But thanks to my friend’s brainwashing, “no” was the first word that came out of my mouth. I had always been more of a “yes” person and it was a magical moment for me to view life from the other side of the coin.
I think we are all either “yes” people or “no” people, having one of these words set in our minds as a default when we are too tired, stressed, or drunk to think. But in the war between yeses and nos, I now try to plant myself firmly on the side of the nos, because really there are only a few things in life you need to say yes to, but a never-ending stream of things you need to reject. Or as my husband tells me every morning “Broad and spacious is the path leading to destruction.”
I was determined not to write this song because it seemed quite weird to me and my ambition at the time was to be the most normal person in the universe. Nonetheless, it would not stop singing in my head, over and over, until finally I relented and wrote it down.
If I had to speculate on its meaning, I would guess it is a mating song for some member of the vegetable kingdom. Their ways are not our ways. I think many of the songs (and other ideas) that end up in our heads are placed there by plants.
At some point while living in Santa Fe, I decided I had to change my favorite colors if I wanted to be a true musician. Pink would no longer do. I felt that blue- with a little green mixed in- was the true color of music. The true purpose of music, as I saw it, was to tap into parallel realities so that the expanse of our everyday world could be increased. Blue is open and expanding, while green gives things a wicked twist helping us to see things from non-human perspectives.
I see life as a big green expanse of land with roads cut through it. Life itself may be grand, but our perceptions, thoughts, and even emotions are generally limited to travelling the roads that have been carved out by others. Sometimes this can get a little claustrophobic, depending on how many roads we have access to. A limited view of life can also cause pettiness and greed, as we try to grab as many donuts as possible from the tiny tray in front of us. Some people try to expand their reality through drugs, but if you’re not careful you could end up off-roading it and never finding your way back. Some people join spiritual cults and religions, which helps to liberate pieces of them while locking the unacceptable parts in cages. But music, on the other hand, is just about communicating with new realities while trying to keep your feet planted in your current one. That way you can gradually learn about new roads to travel, and even find some places to build new ones.
So, I thought blue-green would help me accomplish this. Too bad I was so poor that the only way I could change favorite colors was to buy a blue teddy bear sweater I saw on clearance, and wear it on my head like a hat.
When I wrote this song, I was scared all the time. A feeling of absolute terror and doom was a constant in my life. If I was taking a shower, I would feel like a psycho was just about to pull back the shower curtain. If I was walking outside, I would feel like a car was just about to screech to a halt and force me inside at gunpoint.
Because of that, I suppose, I tried to surround myself by things that were as non-threatening as possible. Everything in my apartment had to be pale pink (or white when that wasn’t possible). Pictures of unicorns had to fill every wall (preferably baby unicorns being protected by their mothers). I only read children’s books and rarely ate anything other than dessert. I would spazz out and begin to cry if James mentioned anything remotely dangerous or violent from the news or world events.
Smells would especially freak me out. I couldn’t tolerate the smell of any savory food. And perhaps due to living in such a smell bubble, my sense of smell started to get more and more sensitive. Soon, I could tell what James was thinking about through subtle “smell puffs” he would release. Cupcake or baked good puffs meant he wanted to spend time with me, and the faintest puff of meat and tomatoes meant he was thinking about work, with garlic and onions being added if he was angry at his boss.
I wrote this song in Santa Fe, but it is still following a “rule” I established for myself at some point in Nashville, which is that every song must have the phrase “making love” somewhere in the chorus. Why did I establish this as a rule? I don’t know- it just gave me tickley feelings inside…
The phrase “making love” reminds me of something that in high school we used to call a Jinx-99. A Jinx-99 is a man with oiled hair, a thick mustache, and a tank top who gives you red roses and chocolate body oil on Valentine’s Day. He is just too much man, like having to eat a whole stick of butter with no bread. The phrase “making love” reminds me of that, too sticky & sincere to bear, which is what made it irresistible.
So, anyway, I wrote this song in Santa Fe, where, as I’ve mentioned, I lived in a weekly motel off the side of a highway, a very isolated and unenriched location. Before this, I had lived in Nashville, where I had a car and was constantly going here and there. Now I did not have a car and was stuck in the middle of nowhere. All day long, while my husband worked, I sat in a tiny motel room. It may be hard to understand the effect this has on a person’s mind unless you have experienced it yourself.
Although I had rarely watched tv before, I now spent countless hours being tortured and brainwashed by Country Music Television. It made me nauseous, but I couldn’t turn it off. Eventually, I had to return the television to the front office.
In a desperate effort to not die from lack of stimulation, I began prank calling people everyday as part of my morning routine- 11 people first thing every day before breakfast. I covered all my clothes in rhinestones, sequins, and other reflective surfaces (one of the lies they told on Country Music Television was that you could never be depressed while wearing rhinestones). I hoped that wearing these clothes beneath the bright desert sun would somehow energize me. I started wearing feathered headdresses, hoping that they would draw more energy from the air into my brain. And sometimes, I would walk alongside the highway carrying a red ball so large I could barely hold it, hoping it would draw attention from the people driving by, hoping their psychic energy would somehow keep me from going insane. But it was too late- I already was.
Insane people are like corpses, though, they point to a mystery- what happened to this person, who did it? Generally people do not murder themselves, and generally they do not drive themselves insane.
I wrote this song while living in Los Angeles… I heard these tiny, little voices singing it in unison while I was sleeping, so I woke up & wrote it down, although it seemed like an odd little song, and not very rock n’ rolly.
