oh wait! Here’s a “lyric” video!

I still really like this one. Ok first things first. Guitar and bass on this one are by Guy Schwartz.

He came over at about 2AM one day, smoked some weed, and just banged out these tracks. I owe him maybe a penny just like I owe Rob and Sandy. I also gave him partial song writing credit because in my mind, if you make up a guitar line, that’s writing. That’s NOT song writing from the traditional ASCAP/BMI point of view, but whatever.

Poor Guy. I think he was pressured by his squeeze, Marlo Blue, to go ahead and make a smart political connection by going over to this young cat’s house and doing a track or two. Poor kid’s desperate for players! (Poor kid would be me.) But in the end, Guy loves playing, and he’s so good he just knocks whatever it is out and I’m such a laid back producer that it’s like, you come in my studio, you play through a couple times and I’m like “cool that was great see ya later”. Later on I edit and tweak and you get this weird thing.

He played two basslines and I just freaking put them on top of each other in the song. It worked, screw it!

That session was a real millenium falcon moment too. I was running with my relatively new Linux audio machine and it was just always hanging on by a thread. The session ended when the whole machine just died and would totally not boot. The hard drive was wacked in some mysterious way and I had to go “well Guy, that’s it for us, hopefully I’ll be able to rescue what we did just now otherwise it’s gone” and he went home, I think. But I managed, through IT geek magic, to rescue it.

That’s one story of this song. The other story is this:

In very early 2004 (day after Christmas 2003 if you want to be precise) me and my long time famed girlfriend Tamara broke up, and after a bunch of hemming and hawing, I found an apartment in the Montrose of Houston. I left my studio in the room it was in in the house we lived in, me, Tamara, our friends Jill (now married and in the UK), J (a badass guitarist/singer/songwriter, like truly exceptional), and Rebecca (an incredible poet).

See I left the studio in that house, even though I was moving out, because like happens so often, I figured me and Tamara were just on like a 3 month break. Oh lord how dumb is that? Well after a month or two of occasionally going over to work in the studio (not enough) but having to see Tamara and deal with her new relationship and all of that really insane shit (including J, who was previously with Jill, moving out almost at the same time), basically being this weird obsolete cracker with everybody in the house moving into different relationships (ever hold a crying ex girlfriend while she sobs about her dying father while reading a note from her roomate saying she needed cuddling from NewGuy? Not recommended), I got instantly fed up to no end and in one day, without telling anyone in the house I would, dragged the whole studio down out of that room, packed it in my little Nissan truck, and carried it to my apartment.

Originally the apartment was supposed to be JUST apartment. Not having home and work combined seemed like a good healthy idea. Then again I also thought Tamara would be coming over banging my brains out on the futon.

So it was small. And I took every stick out of that studio (which was one room but with lots of hidden storage, really); the mix desk, the gear, the acoustic treatment, the label product, rugs, blinds, all of it, everything I’d built, and I just shoved it in my apartment. I just literally piled it all up. I had this dining room table and there was this pile of foam (like picture bed foam, egg crate bed foam) completely covering it and mounding all the way nearly to the ceiling. And gear was strewn about completely engulfing the front room, the kitchen, into the back in the bedroom. Literally, there was only a path as wide as a human to walk through to the bed in the back, and you could kind of step over to the desk in the corner of the front room and get at the computer.

For MONTHS I left it like that. It was all this gear and foam and wood and CDs in this pile, and on any given night or day, you’d come in and see me passed out at the computer with these sheets of music from music theory class at University of Houston strewn all about me on the desk and on the floor, and just beer bottles and bottle caps every where, next to me, on the floor, on the desk, everywhere. Maybe there’d be some beer staining some of the sheet music.

What I’d do is, every night I’d get the cheapest six pack I could find – on sale stale keystone ice for 3 dollars, and I’d come home after class (I was also on prosac and it can make you kind of hazy), after my music theory and computer science and history and Choyun Ryu (basically taekwondo) class (held in the UH basketball arena), and I’d put on either one or both of:

Manu Chao
Jack Johnson

And drink the whole six pack as fast as possible. Sometimes I’d have two. And do my theory homework. None of the other classes had homework that I wouldn’t be done with by the time I got out of my job as a computer lab monitor. I’d get as drunk as possible and bang out the theory homework, and sometimes the phone would ring, and it was Tamara enough times that I just said “I’m gonna ignore this for my own good”. To this day I ignore phones. I didn’t have a cell phone. The reason I played Manu Chao or Jack Johnson is because my friend Tamantha gave me CDs of them right when I moved. She was sort of sharing new things with me, giving me new comforts, and watching out for me. In fact she would come and physically drag me out of the place and put me in her car and take me to Yoga class. Which sometimes sucked ’cause The EX would be there sometimes.

I never slept regularly. I might crash out at 4am and be up at 7:30 and stumble down to work at 8am at the lab. I got a second job at some point doing audio and stage hand work at Cullen Performance Hall on the campus of UH. I LOVED that job. I love theaters.

But for those first few months, I think it was two, maybe three, I’d either be on the floor in there on the tile, crying or hitting something, or doing that homework. I did nothing else. I can’t even recall if I ate. I must have sometimes. The apartment was red tile, open kitchen/bar, not fancy, but really neat and would’ve been great for cooking, having friends over, being a sort of cool collected graduate student. Nope. Not happenin.

I’d lay on the floor and occasionally I’d hear the neighbors fucking for their webcam. They were webcam sex people. You could hear them discussing what the customers wanted to see.

And I never set up that studio.

Then one day I get a call from Dustin, and I think for his demo reel, he wanted a – well I don’t know what he wanted, to tell you the truth. I know he needed a swing song, which we tried to turn Larry’s Cat In The Desert into, and anyway, he needed it like tommorrow.

So that night I threw the whole fucking studio back together. This is not like you might be thinking, where it’s hook up the computer and plug in a speaker and you’re good. By this time, my studios were massively complex project studios with 32 channel patchbays and full on accoustic treatments that I’d developed over the years to be able to travel from place to place. So I had a LOT of hammering, screwing, nailing, rebuilding furniture, tacking up foam, and wiring to do. I just did it that night, all of it. I – you guessed it – drank my six beers in a row and hammered all fucking night.

Then without stopping, I started trying to make a song. I just started making a song about being a bachelor, now that I say that I think that was what Dustin wanted.

I’m sure he really wasn’t expecting what I did, but really at that point the ONLY thing I could write was this freakin song. A couple days later Guy came in, I banged out the mix, and voila.

And well, here’s the lyrics:

I’ve got my head shaved
I did it with a hunting knife
bet you didn’t know
those things are sharper than a bad life

I’m just a bachelor now
bottle caps and bad teeth
and I don’t know when I’ll be back again
so don’t wait up for me

I’m just a bad boy
livin in a bad world
and if I drink myself to death tonight
you know where I’ll be

You probably want a chorus
but a chorus you won’t get
because my mouth is dry
I’m way too high
and a chorus I’d forget
but none of that shit matters now
’cause no one’s here but me
and if you think I’ll follow rules
we made in ’93
you’re wrong

and now I’m leavin you
and I don’t miss you girl
because you never understood me
but I don’t think you’re wrong
and I don’t think you’re right
I just think you don’t exist anymore
I close the door

You probably want a chorus
but a chorus you won’t get
because my mouth is dry
I’m way too high
and a chorus I’d forget
but none of that shit matters now
’cause no one’s here but me
and if you think I’ll follow rules
we made in ’93
you’re wrong

this is the question of the hour
I need to take my shower
but I ain’t got no reason to be clean
man this is great
you should see what I just ate
I done tequilafied my mind
yes I think I will be fine
I’m gonna cough and fart and spit
and when I want I’ll take a shit
and when I find the end of hell
you’ll be the first that I won’t tell

man you don’t know the half of it
I don’t need the pain of it
you can’t be the one to make me see

You probably want a chorus
but a chorus you won’t get
because my mouth is dry
I’m way too high
and a chorus I’d forget
but none of that shit matters now
’cause no one’s here but me
and if you think I’ll follow rules
we made in ’93
you’re wrong

[purchase_link id=”761″ text=”Download Bleed from Me Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

CD price: $12.00

Buy Digitally