12. Bad Advice

Sometimes you have high hopes for a tune.  I did for this one.  I felt that I had written something stompy and compelling.  The subject was fairly evolved for a rock song - wisdom through experience.  The whole point is that you learn more outside of your comfort zone.  However, being prodded beyond that by some charismatic sociopath can be dangerous.  Let's get this out of the way: this is in no way autobiographical.  None of my tunes are.  I do what creative people do: make stuff up.  I'm always amused at those movies about novelists, writers and whatnot who can't write a word unless they've gone through some transformative experience - which they promptly fictionalize.  That's how Hollywood views the creative process.  It can't be written about or described unless it really happened.  Bah, I say.  Bah!  If things worked like that, how on earth would Tolstoy have written War and Peace?  He would have needed a time machine to experience Napoleon's invasion of Russia and its subsequent turmoil in order to write about it, yes?  No.  Bah!

OK, so I've posted the better part of four albums and I'm just saying this: all my stuff is made up.  It's so made up that even my opinions are fabricated.  Case in point: this song.  I don't believe that you should follow a charismatic sociopath anywhere, let alone allow him to call the shots for you.  But that's what happens here.  Like I said, I had high hopes for this tune.  They didn't materialize.  For some reason, this arrangement just falls flat.  There are live drums (as opposed to a drum machine), but everything else is a keyboard.  For the record, I do like the solo (it's a clavinet, believe it or not), but maybe I would have been better off adding a live guitar.  I don't know.  Perhaps it would have helped.  As it is, this is one of those tunes that I almost always skip without hesitation.  It's easy to pretend like I'm not responsible for it.  It's strange that prior to recording this album, I really thought that this track would light it up, while I thought Alsace-Lorraine was just a throwaway.  It turns out that this tune is something of a throwaway and Alsace-Lorraine is the one that I totally dig.  Funny how that works.