Here’s a pretty weird one. I had this concept in my head around, oh 2002 or so, where I thought of having songs that were about 6 minutes long, and the deal was, the first three minutes would be arranged like a regular pop song, and there’d be a radio edit where that’s all you’d hear, but then on the album, it would shift and go into something entirely different. “The 6 minute double song” I called the concept or something. Probably it’s not an original concept but I don’t know.

So this was one of those. I had this whole version recorded, where my man Larry Lines played guitars and had this whole jazz thing going in the part where the song changes, and it was getting pretty neat.

Well I lost those tracks. They’re gone forever. So a couple years later I had to completely do this song over again. COMPLETELY. And I didn’t have ANYthing but the lyrics. I had no idea what key it was in or what it sounded like. So I redid it around the same concept, and had Eric do guitars. I just sort of told him what we’d done.

And we would do the first half live, just me and him and his acoustic guitar.

The lyrics. I wrote the poem that comes at the end first. 10,000 Mirrors. I wrote it in a dance club in Corpus Christi, TX on a bunch of A4 size (that’s half size) pieces of paper. The club was mixed, but had a lot of gay patrons, and it was like any dance club, dark, misty, sweaty, etc. I used to go to a lot of dance clubs and not dance. I’d write poetry or do martial arts in the middle of everybody. Well I was writing that night, while all my slam teammates danced, and what I wrote about was the thought that I was having that damn, what a jip our society lays on you if you’re gay. You end up with this huge risk of being relegated to this fucked up existence in the dark because out in the light, nobody will let you be a part of it. Of course, that’s not just being gay. It’s being black, or small, or having CF, or a woman, or just really just ANYTHING damn near. Almost nobody doesn’t have that feeling.

Of course eventually you have to realize you’re NOT as unique as you think, and say fuck this, I’m gonna be in life, fuck anybody who says I shouldn’t be a part of life, and I don’t have to live in the dark dank places and slip between the cracks.

So anyway this is that poem. I remember telling my friend Doug about it, who happens to be bi, and feeling self conscious that maybe I’d overstepped my bounds.

Then I wrote the raps later, and they’re mostly about this one friend of mine at the time who had just taken the whole “them and us” bullshit thing too far. Everywhere we went it was “that idiot”, “those morons”, etc. The idea that there was an enemy, that people out there, other than us, were fucked up morons. This idea is of course all over the place, but seriously, here’s a little advice for all you kiddos reading this: If you have a friend who says you’re great, but “so and so” is wrong or fucked up, watch it. Sooner or later that friend will turn on you. Who you really want to be around and trust are people who are saying good things about other people who are not there with you. You WILL end up on the “other side”, trust me on that one. So the verse is about that thing of wondering “dude you’re a little hateful, I’m a little worried when you’ll turn on me”.

And there you have it. There was some interesting processing on some of the tracks where I pitch shifted something and put some weird echo and suddenly it turned into an unexpected thing, and the drums of course are all weirdy but it’s a nice change too so hey. There ya go!

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

Buy Digitally