UPDATE 2/23/09: Here is the final, final mix of the song (unmastered):
[[[[[ DOWNLOAD THE FINAL "LONG WAY OFF" (UNMASTERED) HERE ]]]]]
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UPDATE 2/11/09: IGNORE THOSE OTHER VERSIONS OF THE SONG. they are all a fucking joke, only worth listening to if you want to hear how lost i was before last night's breakthrough.
[[[[[ DOWNLOAD THE REAL "LONG WAY OFF" HERE... ]]]]]
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UPDATE 2/10/09: i still wasn't happy with the clean sound on this song, so i re-recorded the guitar with way more distortion and i put way more fuzz on my voice as well. this sound is way more alive i think. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEWER "LONG WAY OFF"
UPDATE 2/4/09: i bought a new mic and re-recorded the vocal. it sounds much better. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LONG WAY OFF
i'm going to post the rough versions of these as i finish them. this is the first track off the album, Long Way Off.
i started these lyrics thinking the song was about a man and a woman who had an affair a long time ago but it got screwed up, and now their lives didn't turn out like they'd hoped, and the man was begging for another shot. the way these things usually go is, you start writing about one thing and you realize that you're writing about an entirely other thing, so at some point you need to surrender to that thing you're actually trying to say because it's going to fuck up whatever your previous plans were anyway.
this is a roundabout way of saying that i realized this song was about the fact that i fled my household as soon as i was able, and it's only recently that i've been trying to reconcile my way back to feeling connected to my family in spite of a lot of water under the bridge.
i am the oldest, or the eldest, as my mother would say. my sister and brother are younger than me, closer in age to one another than to myself. we have a pretty common sibling dynamic, i think: i was the striver, my brother was the problem, and my sister was in the middle.
my parents had a rough time of it. they divorced when i was 8, and my mother settled into a pretty serious drinking problem, but more than that, she was on a self-destructive path that she thankfully tried to shield us from as much as possible. my mother has struggled with depression her whole life, and our house was a very sad place. my mother was also working three jobs to support us, and i remember her car (an old Yugo -- remember those?) breaking down nearly once a month. things seemed hopeless. various men moved in and out of our lives; one of them was a heroin and speed addict who stole many of my mother's few remaining valuables. social services visited our house a few times. i was also a rebellious kid at this point, acting out and playing with fire and breaking windows and generally being destructive. i was 9. after she put us to bed, my mother would listen to one depressing album after another, and drink cheap wine until she passed out. i remember hearing Dire Straits' "Why Worry" (off their classic Brothers In Arms) as my mother quietly cried and cried, thinking we couldn't hear her. at some point she prepared us for the worst -- we were being evicted from our house and would have to move into a homeless shelter. at the last minute, a friend of my mother's took pity on us and invited our family to move into his family's house in the country near Leon Springs, out on I-10 just west of Boerne. this situation was a little rough as well -- the other family didn't mingle well with mine, and the older brother knocked us around a little bit and the mother beat us with a belt a few times. their house was where i first began to teach myself to play piano, though, so i will always be grateful for that at least.
soon, my mother remarried, and at first times were a bit better, but something turned at some point, and after that my mother and stepfather were always swamped with debt. i remember the irs agents coming by the house, snooping around each room and treating my mother and stepfather with utter contempt, as if to find evidence that my mother and stepfather were tax cheats, and not just hopelessly behind on all their bills.
so, my household (and by extension, my hometown and home state) was a place that i knew i had to get away from. and i did. my mother missed me, but she also gave me plenty of space throughout my twenties to work out exactly what the hell i thought about everything, and i'm grateful for that.
and then there is my brilliant, troubled brother. he picked up painting from my mother, who was an artist herself. he and my mother were a volatile pair, though, and it soon became clear that their sicknesses were exacerbating one another. when he was a teenager, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is a mental disease doctors are still struggling to understand. his condition grew more serious after high school, and became more difficult to medicate. he turned to crack and began self-medicating, which culminated in his involvement in a robbery in an attempt to get drug money.
while in the texas justice system, he was routinely denied access to his medication; this happened almost every time he was transferred to a new facility. he was having an incredibly hard time with his mental anguish at that point; the voices in his head grew so loud at one time that he tried to take out his eye in order to stop them (his self portrait at the bottom right hand side of this page visually describes this incident).
finally, after my father lobbied extensively to the judge and to the state legislature, david got treated a bit better and was relatively stable. in the meantime, his art had developed into something quite profound and wrenching as he struggled with this sickness that will be with him his whole life.
there are no easy answers; my brother has a hard time even under the best medication. he slips into addiction easily, seeking to kill the pain if he can't quiet the storm.
for a long while in my twenties, my brother and i didn't speak much. i didn't know how to handle his sickness, and i told myself that i was working so hard at my own success so that i could afford better treatment for him as the family breadwinner. this was part true, but of course only part.
but now he and i are speaking to one another again, and it feels good. i admire him so much, and he has known troubles that i couldn't begin to fathom. my mother and i are becoming closer as well, and my sister (who has struggled a great deal with her own family demons) is finally building a stable life for herself with a pretty terrific guy and a job that she is passionate about. we are all slowly putting things back together, i think.
so, Long Way Off is about reconciling with my family again after many years of trying to figure out what exactly happened when i was growing up, and how those things have shaped me into the person i am today, for better or worse.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "LONG WAY OFF"
