{TL;DR} - These are the lyrics to a song that I wrote the music (guitar part) to a while back, and which I have been gradually refining over the past number of months, and which I hope to have an uploaded sound-file recording of a good enough quality to likewise upload over the next couple of months. At that time, this lyrics file will likewise be updated to show the chords and tab...

Just like Austin TX indy-rock band ‘Spoon’ said in their song “Rhthm [sic] & Soul” off of their 2007 album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga:

“…gets cold in ways you always forget”.

That line was one of those weird things that just really hooks me quite deeply, and I have purposefully omitted just what exact place they were referring to as “getting cold”, because really, outside of the context of the song, itself, it’s not all that important.

(Although, for those who are wondering, the place that Spoon was referring to was “Windsor”, although they’re far less clear about which particular Windsor they were referring to), hence I feel that outside of the song’s direct context, the statement can almost be a snowclone template, where the placeholder value can easily be swapped for something else.

In short: inspirations can sometimes be a strange, tricky mistress indeed.

Now, with regards to this song in particular, the skeleton of the lyrics started out in late summer of 2019 as my own piss-take on many of the heavy-handed Social-Morality Tale (aka ‘Teen Tragedy’) songs that were rife in the 1950s and 1960s, of which a few of the best-known include: “Teen Angel”. “Last Kiss”, “Tell Laura I Love Her”, and “Leader of the Pack.” As I said, that was the original, low-brow intention for this song, but it ultimately turned into a great deal more than that (and likewise a great deal less low-brow in the process).

Essentially, the earliest germ of an idea that this piece ultimately grew from, was something that occurred to me around the second or third time that I heard Pearl Jam’s cover of “Last Kiss” that they did for a 1999 charity album to raise money for Kosovo refugees.

Now, many of you, who just read that previous paragraph are probably already asking the same question, so I might as well get the answer out of the way before I continue.

With regards to the first time that I heard Pearl Jam’s cover of ‘Last Kiss’…

Well, to put it bluntly: Let’s just say that my initial reaction, even as a casual Pearl Jam fan, who bought several of their albums way back when, started with a painful cringe, and went quickly downhill from there. The first time I heard Eddie Vedder warble and death-rattle-bellow his way through the song, I thought he sounded like a dying moose, on some frozen interstate, who has just been hit by a Swift Transportation semi…
It was as if Eddie, himself, were a dying accident victim, along with the original subject of the song. I also, quite frankly, hoped that I would never be unfortunate enough to have to hear it again. Unfortunately, as I was working on a cash register in a drugstore at the time, and had no way of changing the music that was played on the store loudspeakers, I wound up having to hear the song several times a day for the next few weeks.
But, the thing is, it turned out that those forced repeat-listenings eventually revealed itself to be a good thing, because after one of those slightly later, repeat listenings, I had one of those ‘scales-falling-from-St.-Paul’s-eyes-on-the-road-to-Damascus’ realisations, when I suddenly said to myself:

“Oh. My. God… Eddie actually gets this song! Last Kiss
actually needs to be mocked!”

I understood right then and there, that there was actually a delicious sort of Dadaism to it, just like in the Punk-Era example of Sid Vicious tonelessly croaking his way through Paul Anka’s (made famous by Sinatra) song “My Way” in The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle, or, a few generations before that, Oscar Wilde commenting on Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Match Girl” by terming it as being so absurdly, ridiculously sad that it actually became unintentionally, darkly funny in its own way.

Hence, taking my cue from Eddie, and many, who had gone before; as I set out to write this, I made sure I put all the right clichés into all the right places, starting with the clichéd lame parents giving their equally-clichéd lame advice to the cookie-cutter rebellious teen, who, by virtue of being at that magically-omniscient stage that all teenagers seem to go through, simply knows everything, and who (like in all other Teen Morality tales), is about to make the same mistakes of unfettered hubris that teens-who-know-everything have been making ever since the Greek tragedy of Icarus refusing to listen to the warnings of his father Daedalus, and flying too close to the sun.

Likewise, the protagonist of the song—this Icarus—simply answers right back to the lame warnings of (in this case, her), lame parents, with clichéd rebellious statements of her own.

If nothing else, I do hope that that, at least, is something that I have succeeded in capturing in this piece.

(oh, and the ‘she’ in the title should not be taken as an absolute. I believe that the genders of both the narrator and the protagonist can just as easily be changed so some other combination, and the piece can still work. My sole and only reason for using ‘she’ in this particular case was that it fits better with the traditional. clichéd template of this sort of song)

So, as I already said, there was originally a bit of Dadaist/mocking intention in the earliest stages of writing this. However, I found out for myself the hard way that the process of handling hazardous materials such as this can sometimes turn out in unexpected ways… Perhaps I had reached for the saccharine, but I wound up accidentally grabbing a cane sugar and stevia mixture instead, because during the process of writing this piece, some of my original intentions started to wander, and go a bit sideways (as they often do), and maybe, unintentionally, I have also wound up writing a rather catchy (and maybe even pretty) song.

At some point during the writing process, I also found the skeleton of the song lyrics starting to gain some subtle flavours of a Generation X lament through the lens of the Eighties pop and media culture that my High School years were saturated with. Hence, I also wanted to try and give this a bit of an Eighties High School context, complete with Lisa Frank colours, and Brat-Pack lookalikes in the video that I saw in my head. Hell, maybe even directed by John Hughes, himself somewhere in that hungry year-and-a-half he had between Pretty in Pink, and Uncle Buck.

So, as part of the infusion of Gen-X pop-culture flavour, there is also a nod to the Late Sixties-to-Early Eighties media phenomenon known as the “Missing White Girls” moral panic, which, here in Canada, at least, seemed to finally burn itself out during Christie Blatchford’s (writing for the Toronto Sun), never-ending series of blood-dripping-prose articles during the wall-to-wall news coverage of the Bernardo/Homolka murders (or “Paulie” and “Karly-Curls”, as Blatchford called them).

Two particular cases from that era, (as in, a few years before the infamous Paulie and Karly-Curls), which gave me nightmares as a kid were the 1984 disappearance and murder of Christine Jessop (which, oddly enough was finally solved via improved DNA technology, in mid-2020), and a second one from a year earlier in 1983, when a girl named Sharin’ Keenan disappeared in Toronto, and was found eight days later, wrapped in trash bags, and stuffed into a refrigerator in a rooming house.

To this day, I can still remember listening to my bedside clock-radio (a pre-LED neon-lit flip-numbers type), the music helping me slowly drift off to sleep, as it usually did, when the announcer broke into the programming to declare in sombre tones that: “Sharin’ Keenan’s father blew out his candle of hope today…”

Still, in the end, what I have outlined is only one of the many possible interpretations of this song (and perhaps one of the most negative possibilities). I have (of course) also envisioned quite a few others, some of which are a great deal more positive. And, even beyond that, I don’t think I could disagree with most other possible interpretations that other people could likewise come up with, even if I didn’t think of them myself, simply because I do feel that, in the end, this song’s definitive interpretation simply cannot be locked down. Sometimes things can just take on a life of their own, and if someone else can point out yet another logical possible take on this, I probably can’t discount it.

It’s also taken me this long before I felt that my guitar skills had progressed to the point, where I can play the song nearly as well as I could always hear it in my head during the writing process (if that makes any sense). Unlike the adaptations I've done of some of my earlier stuff (some of which dates back to my teens), and which often had quite a few years to come together gradually and organically, like lichen growing on a rock, this one has truly been a ‘from the ground, up’ process, and instead of a slow-growing lichen, it has perhaps felt as if it developed more like the musical equivalent of a mayfly, that, during its brief maturity, lives but a few, short days simply to mate and then die.

As I said in the {TL;DR}, I will eventually be updating this posting to include the guitar tabs, and also include a sound-file of the piece, just as soon as I feel I can do a recording of this that I won’t unduly embarrass myself by posting. The good news is that (as of December 2020), I feel that I have finally progressed enough with the guitar and vocals that that’s probably a couple of months-off (fingers crossed)

I guess I will close off this excessively-long-winded narrative by saying that: “Hey, if I want to dream big, maybe, when I finally get around to posting the actual sound file of the song, some talented, well-known artist might hear it and like it well enough to want to cover it, and maybe that will get me enough royalties that I can devote the rest of my life to casual artistic endeavours, instead of the Alanis Morissette “ironic” casual-but-not-so-“casual” unskilled manual labour positions via temp agencies, which I had been forced to try and support myself off of, ever since graduating from my (thus far, utterly useless) Biological Sciences degrees!"

Because, after all, casual artistic endeavours hold out more promise for ageing gracefully into reasonably secure and contented late adulthood and old age than unskilled manual temp labour, which can hold out only for so long as my so-called “body temple” hasn’t yet crumbled into the type of bloated ruins that only a North American lifestyle can earn for oneself.

As Debbie Harry once sang: (at least) dreaming is still free…

“She Climbed Higher…”