All These Years
This song took me forever to write. It started as a guitar riff that my uncle Kelly showed me years ago. I am always trying to learn things on guitar that are beyond the G, C, D, and E-minor chords I am so well-versed in, and Kelly always seemed to have something cool to show me. One day at his house, he showed me this riff:
As you may know by now, guitar is not my strongest instrument, as evidenced by the sheer amount of focus going on in that video. But when my uncle showed me this riff, I thought it was sooo coool because it wasn’t terribly difficult to pull off, and I thought it sounded really cool. I liked the suspended chords, and that little melody stuck in my head for the better part of five years before I finally had words and a structure to go with it.
To tell the story of this song, I need to tell you a story about a couple I used to know. I played their wedding, along with my band, and a great time was had by all. They were young– early twenties, I want to say. They had been together since high school. They were responsible adults with jobs and educations. Happily Ever After, right?
Happily ever after wasn’t really in the cards for them. About six years after they got married, we were all aware that their relationship was actually quite toxic, with a lot of anger and controlling manipulation. But, there was also a lot of love there, and a lot of time that they’d spent together, trying to build something lasting and substantial. They did counseling, through most of their marriage, I later found out. Nothing seemed to change the patterns that kept them unhappily together. Even if you know that something’s stalled out or toxic or “over,” it’s really difficult to make a change to leave. At one point, he got so exasperated with trying to make a change but being unable or unprepared to do so, he said, “Nobody’s leaving here. Not after all these years.” He then compared his situation to a logical dilemma called the Sunk Cost Fallacy. The premise is that the more you have invested in something, either with time, energy, or money, the less likely you are to give up on that investment, even if it’s a bad one. It applies easiest to used cars– after a certain point, you are sinking more and more money into the vehicle, but it doesn’t make it more valuable. It’s going to continue decreasing in value until it’s worthless. But you think if you just fix that one last part, it’ll be like it used to be, shiny and new. That’s how it was going in their relationship. He felt like they had both invested too much to actually separate and go their own ways. It seemed like admitting defeat, throwing away all that time that was spent– for nothing.
I thought it was an interesting premise for a song. I had also been in a relationship like that, where I knew it wasn’t good for me, but I felt like if I just tried a little harder, waited a little longer, gave it more space and room to grow that the relationship would somehow salvage itself. It didn’t. I was always torn between wondering if it was better to give him space to sort out what he was going through, or if I needed to hold on even tighter. Lately, baby, I just don’t know if I should pull you closer or let you go…. It was a dilemma that took me the better part of three years to sort out, and it didn’t lead to happily ever after, either. (Read all the lyrics here.)
When I lost my brother, something kind of snapped for my friends, and they filed for divorce. He said he felt more urgency after watching me go through that kind of loss–more urgency to be happy, more urgency to not waste more time, because the consequences of time and the fleeting nature of it were all on our minds a little more after the plane crash. (If you’re just joining us on this blog, and haven’t been reading the stories sequentially, you’ll want to check out the story behind Heartbroken, here.) I’m happy to say that he’s happy now, in a much more fulfilling and loving relationship. It was difficult for him to process the loss of a marriage– there’s grief and love and all kinds of conflicting emotions there. As I was grieving my brother, he was grieving his marriage. It took some time. It still takes some time, sometimes. The first line in the chorus, Lately I just sit and stare, talk to a ghost that isn’t there, is speaking directly to that grieving process. I would find myself sitting, staring, having a conversation with someone who wasn’t there to answer me. You feel like a crazy person sometimes when you’re dealing with that kind of grief, but sometimes, sitting and staring is just about all you can handle.
In the studio, we decided we wanted a heavy sound. We went pretty far on the electric side of things, and towards the end of the day, Scott Smith suggested we try something with the drums. It’s always kind of exciting when he does that; you never know what kind of idea he’s had. He dug through a big drawer of cables and other items and pulled out an old telephone receiver. You know, the old-school style that hung on the wall, complete with the coiled cord. He had spliced a mic cable onto the end of it, and had Cyle Talley do a fairly simple but repetitive beat by himself for about 30 seconds. The end result was a really compressed sound– you remember how the old phones made everything sound small, muted, and far away? That’s the drum beat that you hear at the beginning of the song– it sounds smaller than everything else, farther away than the piano. It became one of my favorite features of the song, probably partially because I had been there to witness how the old phone made such a difference.
As you can see, even with all of our technological advances, sometimes you still need an analog phone.
This song is a bigger story than just the divorce of my friends or my relationship, and even bigger than losing my brother. I know a lot of people that have stayed together for the long-haul; my parents have been married for over 40 years, I have lots of people in my life who never saw divorce as an option. But this song was my way of asking the questions that are so hard to answer: Is it even possible for two people to get together and stay together and be happy together, for all those years? Even if there is love there, does the silence eventually creep in? Even if respect and trust are intact, does apathy eventually take over? I still don’t know the answers to those questions, but I believe it’s possible to fall in love and stay in love and stay together and stay happy. Maybe the rush of a new relationship will fade into a sort of comfortable status quo, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe those quiet, silent moments are okay. Maybe there’s comfort in someone’s presence, even if it doesn’t look like the flush of love from the beginning. I’m not there yet, but I’m looking forward to answering those questions for myself, sometime far in the future.
-Lacey
p.s. Next week, I’ll lighten the mood and tell you about my hypothetical love song.
