Chad and I wrote this song about 6 years ago when we were in this phase where we were playing nothing but open mics and coffee houses.  

We were telling ourselves, at the time, that we were building our fanbase through a grassroots movement, but what we really meant by that was that we didn't have a drummer, bassist, or keyboardist who would/could play with us on a consistent basis.  

Anyway, we played just about every freakin' open mic in town and some were good and some were absolutely awful.  One, in particular, turned into our white whale....Uncommon Ground.  On Monday nights, they had this open mic contest where a handful of musicians would play for a small, stuffy, tightly packed back room and they had turned it into a kind of contest so that the person who got the most applause won a bucket of donated money.  It never really amounted to much, but it was sort of bragging rights to win and you were held in high regard the following week....which really meant absolutely nothing.  

So, anyway, Chad and I decided we HAD to win this thing and we threw everything we had at them.  Each week we went back, trying to win that stupid open mic, using whatever song we thought was the absolute best we had to offer at the time.  After a bit, we realized that people were really looking less for good songwriting and more for the "image" of a true coffeehouse artist.  This one guy who kept winning annoyed the hell out of us.  Don't even remember his name, but I remember he was really skinny, had really fwoopy (it's a word) hair and wore a large, casually-wrapped scarf year-round...seriously, no matter how hot it was, he had that damned scarf on as if his precious vocal chords were made of the most precious crystal and needed to be protected at all costs.  

Anyway, the crowd ate him up.  He'd start each song be recounting how "I wrote this song while crashing on the floor of a small hut in a village in rural Laos.  I was taken in by an old farmer who took pity on me and showed me how to swim with the dolphins in the bay..." or some absolutely ridiculous set-up.  After losing to this guy for the third straight time, we got frustrated and wrote this song basically railing against people who take their art too seriously and pretend not to.  

We brought this absolute masterpiece of self-aware irony back to Uncommon Ground the following Monday........and promptly lost to a bald girl who forgot to bring her guitar and simply warbled a capela for ten minutes.  Go figure.

Dissolute

There are some people who just seem destined to self-destruct.  As if there is simply no way they'll be able to keep up this break-neck pace for very long and you find yourself staring at them with the same rubbernecking, gape-mouthed fascination that every highway motorist or fan of reality TV has experienced.

Brian Noel was one of these guys for me.  (He's the surly-looking punk in the picture.) He was a childhood friend of Chad's and, although I had briefly met him once when the band was playing a gig in the Quad Cities, the first time I really met Brian was when a scrawny, tattooed skinhead crawled over the security door of the roof top patio of the building where Chad and I lived.  He slithered over the top of the railing like a demented squirrel and I already knew I liked the guy.  Well....after I realized he wasn't there to steal my television, I liked him.

He lived his life very differently then anyone I knew at the time, simply careening from one thing to the next.  He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and, when his brain was firing on all cylinders, he was a deep and fascinating individual.  And yet, he had no goals.  He had no agenda.  He had no aspiration and no artistic purpose.  He did what he felt like doing and he made what he felt like making and expected you to either dig it or ditch him.  He almost dared you, at times, to be friends with him.  He just made these choices in life which catapulted him into one weird situation after the next and it made for a rather wild ride sometimes, which you simply had to strap yourself in for, or tuck and roll out the suicide door and hope you didn't hit a tree.   

He seemed like a special breed of individual who will never fit into anyone's schedule.  Some people would get swept up with him (either romantically or into friendship) by virtue of the fact that they romanticize the devil-may-care attitude as being the hallmark of the last breed of cowboy.  He had a motley assortment of odd friends and love interests and he was anything but boring.  Unfortunately, the ride has to end eventually and this type of person seemed to me to be destined to either self-destruct, spontaneously combust, or get taken out by the hard and fast lifestyle they lead.

Now, I realize that I, too, am over romanticizing the poor guy.  If he read this, he'd probably snort derisively and roll his eyes....but what can I say, it's hard to write a song about a guy who simply goes to work and comes home and watches Law and Order and goes to bed.  When I wrote this song, he was the one person that kept appearing in my mind, partly out of fascination and partly out of a sense of envy to live that kind of screw-it-all kind of life.

I lost contact with Brian after he married my ex and moved to Toronto (that's a whole different story) but last I heard was that he was divorced and bumming around the QC again.  Oddly enough, I wish him well.  I always liked Noel and I think he was a good guy who tried to do the best with whatever (and whoever) he had.  Anyway. this song was inspired by who I saw him to be, at the time that I knew him.

Interestingly enough, this is the only song from the album with blatant cursing in the lyrics.  They weren't put there to be controversial and I had to wage minor skirmishes to keep the lyrics intact.  It simply seemed the right words to convey the emotion.

Besides.......sometimes it feel good to say bad words.



Bryan Pray

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