The Process #6 — California Death Bed

Posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 // 0 Responses.

Name: California Death Bed
Date Written: 10/22/11
Date Recorded: 11/21/11
Written for: LP4

Alright, enough with the old songs for now. I want to share a song that I’m excited about. In pretty much every interview with any songwriter, they always say their favorite song is the one they’ve written most recently. Slight aside — that is an awful question to ask, as is “where do you get your inspiration?” or anything you could find in two minutes of Googling. Anyway, I think most artists are always excited about their most recent output. As a corollary to this, with each new song, the old fan-favorites become more and more unloved, then they don’t get played live, then the super fans complain. We should all be so lucky.

So there I am, 25 songs into a writing cycle for an album, and obviously I think each one of them pales in comparison to everything I’ve ever written before. In fact, this newest song is the best of the bunch. Well… turns out you can’t put 25 songs on an album unless you’re Operation Ivy. More importantly, it turns out that all 25 of those songs are not nearly as good as I think they are. In fact, there are probably 10-14 album-worthy ones in there. The aforementioned super fans will one day read an interview where they lock onto the number 25 and obsess over the fact that there are scores of material they’ve never heard. I am here to tell you, super fan, that there is a reason for that.

I often don’t know what songs are going to make an album until we’ve really started working on arranging them. Sure, some songs work better at an open mic than others, but until the band sits down and hammers each song out, they’re really all just amorphous acoustic blobs. With Small Talk, there were some songs I thought were fantastic that we played once and decided had no place in the world. By the same token, certain songs that I thought would rot in the “Non-Album Songs” folder ended up as some of the better songs on the album.

All this is to introduce one of the songs in consideration for the new album. It’s basically our version of Rihanna’s “California King Bed,” even though that song performed miserably by Rihanna’s standards. Sorry Ri Ri.

Lyrics:

I remain
The very same
Berated saint
Of peeling paint
Unchanged
Unchained

The aftertaste will fade away
Alaska to the Everglades

And I
With my straightened spine
For now at least, let’s have ourselves a good time
And stall a softened skull
Christen cults and goad our gloating ghosts

No not yet
I’m not upset
I’m just a picket sign inside the greater protest
No not since
I cleansed my sins
Open casting calls for kismet
On a California death bed

The last one’s always the
Good ones always die the
Youngest I’ve been the older I
Feel for every careening career
The last one’s always the
Good ones always die the
Youngest I’ve been the older I feel
And that’s why I’m no longer
Chasing the pub-crawlers,
Carpenters, cowards and claims
Calling it changing my name

The aftertaste will fade away
Alaska to the Everglades
Those of us, the fortunate fakes
Get filed away as acetate

Spun in a circle so we never got lost
Sand on the scriptures but we’re cleaning it off
Rich as a king but we’re worried about costs
That’s not smoke from our sparks, that’s just exhaust