Waving at You

"This is rather the best of the early divorce songs, written a good five or six years before I got married, drawn from — what? Some imagined hurt? A lonely Thursday night in December, maybe? Seems like it; I feel like I was having some sort of disagreement with somebody. The main thing I remember though is the riff, if you want to call it that. A fingered C chord that becomes an Am7 and then some kind of modified F whose name I don't know that resolves finally at G, this circular droning looping process that suggested a guy who's trying to break free from a pattern that's never going to let him go, because that pattern is exactly who he is, down deep where all the ghosts and jackals live. He tries at the end to shift the focus, to call his love for somebody a habit, but it's not that: it's love. It's always going to be love. So the song doesn't really end, it just gets stuck. And then I strum a chord for a long time really energetically, because I used to always dig ending my songs like that.

I can tell, listening to this song now, years removed from the night I recorded it, that I was getting pretty into the story: not from the strength of the strumming, but from the way I get real quiet during the end of the vocal. To me, that's the signal that I'm getting so involved with the plotline that I can't really tell the difference between myself and the narrator any more. That is really the point at which I feel like I've succeeded in getting somewhere. Everybody else assumes the louder I sing, the more deeply I'm feeling the emotions, and I do try to oblige, but it's the quiet moments where the shadows sort of start to flesh themselves out. "