I've had a lot to say about this particular song. In fact, you can check out a previous blog post. I wrote the chorus when I was living with my band, Satori, in a log cabin. The chorus was directed towards a friend of mine, Brian Gager, who had been hospitalized and diagnosed as bi-polar. I knew nothing about the disease at the time, but I kept singing, “Get out of touch, get out of touch, you know too much.”
Brian was a very bright young man. He was a great composer and songwriter. I think we both had a lot in common, so I could relate to (what I thought) might be his being overwhelmed by the nature of reality at times. I know I've felt that way, but again, I didn't know much about being bipolar. I always knew there was a song there, but I didn't know how to write it, so the years passed.
I think it was about five years later when I wrote the verses and the bridge (which are the parts that make up this version of the song). I had been living in Brooklyn, New York, I had moved back into my parents' house to finish recording Who are The Navigators?, which Brian had worked on as well. I had a lot to say all of a sudden, and the song came bursting forth.
I tried recording the song for Lost and Found, but I wasn't ready to put it out. Maybe I should have. But I sat on the song for a bit. Shortly after Lost and Found was done, I wrote as third verse:
Your dream's been dogged and demonized
The naked truth overanalyzed
So you stand there cracked and paralyzed
Like you ain't got no choice
Thinkin' that a savior's gonna come
Tell you where that noise keeps comin' from
But the sound that you keep runnin' from
It's the sound of your own voice
Pushed around by the pop psychology
Chained down to the new technology
Why you chasin' that ideology
If it just tears you apart
Don't let the talking heads taunt you
Let go the demons that haunt you
Just be the person you want to
It's so simple it's hard.
It's a great verse, and it's included on the version on Meet The Navigators… again. I recorded that with Andrew Emer, and Phelim White at Graham Hawthorne's studio with Charlie Martinez. We began playing a slower version of the song, which sounds a lot like this version, and the song got very long, so I nixed the last verse. As a fan of Dylan, and as someone who has released long songs before, I don't think that a song being long is a problem, but I thought that a lot more people needed to hear this song, and unfortunately, folks don't always have time to sit and listen. You got to get to the point quickly.
This version was born at NuMedia with myself, Brian Griffin and Naren Rauch. Unfortunately, NuMedia was not around for much longer, and the song was far from complete. In fact, for the longest time, it didn't exist- the recording, I mean. I had the audio files on a hard drive, which ultimately crashed, before I could complete the song. It wasn't until I was visiting Yaron Fuchs up at his studio that I retrieved the original files. That was at the beginning of the summer, and there was nothing but Brian's drums and Naren's guitar. I simply added everything else, because it just had a vibe I wanted to share.
If you ask me (and I'm biased), this song written twenty-five years ago should have been on the radio. Not just because it would have made me wealthy, but because we needed to have this chorus in our heads echoing. I feel that way about a lot of my songs. “Here comes the Hurricane” should have been on the radio! What kind of world we live in if a singer/songwriter like myself had become successful singing songs that dug deep into the human experience. Seriously? Why as a culture do we seem to fear digging deep into ourselves?
I had to hear a lot over my music career about how I wasn't this, or I wasn't that. People seemed to forget about who I was: a soulful artist who brought music in the world to focus not on my pain, but our pain. The music industry never did figure out what to do with me. I know the feeling.