(Sorry for the wait. I had the first two REJECT songs already on my computer but not the rest, for some reason. But worry not, I have begun the minidisc transfer, so I should be more timely in the future. And now without further ado...)
Looking back at your past can be “cringe” as the kids say these days — which as a Gen X/Millennial cusp-aged father of a tween who just used the word “cringe” unironically, would give anyone The Ick.
What I mean to say, is that having time pass and you grow and mature and learn from your ever increasing catalogue of experiences, you gain perspective. There are some things you look back at and shake you head and ask yourself: What was I thinking? You close your eyes, rub your temples, and exhale a sighed: Why?
Why — I am asking now — did I not wait until after I was sick to record the vocals on this song?
It’s not like there was pressure from The Label (any label) to meet some kind of deadline. I wasn’t burning cash at a recording studio and so I had to do it right then! I didn’t need the performance enhancing resonance — that extra “oohhh yeeaaahhhhh” — that can sometimes be the silver lining to having a cold for a singer.
No, I was just straight-up congested in my mom’s garage with no sound proofing, letting the chips fall where they may.
Youth is truly wasted on the young...
The Me that decided to do that is so alien to the Me I am now. He’s beyond my understanding and empathy. The “Why?” of it all is just like when I see a CyberTruck in the real world1.
But maybe that’s too harsh — on past me, that is.
No, those utter dunces have no shame driving those fucking things around. They are beyond eye sores, they are eye herpes! Eye herpetic lesions. I mean, I have been cursed by a hyper-active sense of self, so I am always overflowing with anxiety about what kinds of harsh judgements everyone around me is rendering. But these oblivious mother fuckers in CyberTrucks ... ignorance is bliss? I don’t know.
Arrogance is euphoria?
I just had to address that elephant in the room before diving into the song — but the hindsight and nostalgia of it will come back into play.
For the song, I was inspired by the Brad song “Secret Girl.” It starts with a rhythm being played on a single chord, so I tried that out too. However, it never felt quite right to me. Especially once we started playing it live and we sped it up a little. I definitely used too much distortion on it, too. There needed to be some kind of dynamic ebb and flow with this song, but I could never find it.
We fooled around with different intros while we had it on our setlist, instead of just plugging along on an E, thinking that we could find some way to fix it. But the bones of this song just never had enough calcium. We dropped this song from our sets around the time we got our second batch of songs worked out.
I think one of the reasons I kept trying to keep this song alive was because of the bridge. I love this bridge. The major and minor chord shifts surprised the hell out of me that I could write something like that with only about a year of guitar playing and song writing under my belt. It’s something you can’t really hear with all of the distortion (again, way too much), but in the period of time where we tried to reign in the dynamics of the song, I would clean up the tone and arpeggio the notes of the chords. Hinting at a wistful, dream-like (dare I say shoegaze?) feeling.
And even now (before even listening to it for this post), I still remember the lyrics to everything except the second verse.
She liked to kiss me goodbye / We’d wait until the sun went down at night / She’d take control and show me how it’s done / I never played this way. Never played this game and had fun
And now it’s over before its time / I never had the time / And when it’s over we’d fall asleep thinking / What does the other think?
She said, “Okay. I’ll kiss you this one last time.” / I didn’t feel it. Didn’t feel this last kiss of mine / She said what she want. What she want is to stay friends / I said, “Okay.” I guess that’s how this shit ends
And now it’s over before its time / I never had the time / And when it’s over we’d fall asleep thinking / What does the other think?
Holding hands watching the sun go down / Ice skating in a frozen town / And a million other things we’ll never do / It’s over for me, but not for you
And now it’s over before its time / I never had the time / And when it’s over we’d fall asleep thinking / What does the other think?
My luck has run out before its time / I’ll never have the time / And now it’s over, and you’ll fall asleep / Only to be there in my dreams
This is — like most of the songs on this demo — about the high school girlfriend I had. Just the one.
I told you the nostalgia would come back...
The saying that someone is gone before their time when they die — I, of course, felt like our relationship was over before its time.
“I never had the time” meaning I never took the time to enjoy it while it was happening, and also trailing off and not finishing the thought of “I never had the time of my life.” But that was something that was purely in my head and not even hinted at anywhere within the lyrics or singing it live. Which doesn’t make sense, right? Just a little secret for myself, I guess.
She did actually say that she wanted to stay friends, but I was too much of a stereotypical teenaged boy to realize that having friends is a good thing. But at the time, I didn’t want another friend — and looking back at it now, you know, would we have stayed friends? I’m still friends with three of the guys I went to high school with — and two of them were in my band! We talk and text and stay in touch, but those three guys and my wife are it.
Sure, I made friends from the podcast, and everything, but I don’t talk to any of them regularly. And I know it’s a two-way street, and I’m not putting in that much of an effort, but that’s something I’m trying to work on.
Still, though, having people that know you and you’ve spent time with — it’s an emotional investment that can pay dividends, whereas pure romance is a gamble. And the house always wins...
Okay, that’s not how I really feel now — maybe back then that sentiment would have resonated — but it felt like I needed to pair “gambling” with that aphorism. With how sports gambling has wormed its way into the firmament of everyday life, that fact — that gambling is meant to take your money, not give it to you — is practically never addressed in the ever present advertising across all forms of media. It’s being treated just like another one of your little apps or games you play on your phone. Another thing to waste time on instead of being present with others in the world2.
This song is a back of the book summary of that relationship as it appeared to me at the time. Fresh and immediate. On the ground reportage. No context or analysis. That’s maybe what these are all about — more processing of my past and trying to comfort the kid I was back then, that is still floating around in the tesseract of these songs.
She’s the one that made the first moves for everything. She had boyfriends before me and I was coming in from the bleachers, having never played, and being thrown into a minor league game. She was religious, and my parents had divorced a couple years before, so I was on a similar unspoken page of not wanting to go all the way. It’s hard to talk about that stuff and embarrassing. And if there was one thing that I was good at in that relationship, it was not talking about stuff.
The “Luck” and “Over for me, but not for you” were about how I felt like she was my one shot at happiness. That she would go on to have a better life, and I was left to sink in the mire of my own self pity. But, I wasn’t happy with her — I couldn’t be because of the whole undiagnosed depression thing. And that’s not something that was her job to do — to fix me. Happiness can’t be transferred like carbon credits. Wait a minute...
This is another song where it was just me and Kevin, the drummer. I don’t know if the bass lines I wrote were ever played that way by our bassist at our shows. The solo is me playing through a new Boss DD-5 digital delay pedal that I got before recording, and not really knowing what to do with it. It had a Reverse setting, which seemed cool to fuck around with, but it would take me a couple more years to figure out how to best utilize delay effects.
This was definitely an album track that we tossed aside in favor of our “hits.” I can’t remember how much we played it before recording, but afterward, it hung around for a good long while.
You can probably guess that this isn’t the last song on this demo I wrote about my high school girlfriend. I had a year after our breakup to write the songs we recorded for this, so it was still tender fertile ground. The next song isn’t about her, though.
-bcp
As I’m finishing up this post — today, May 2, 2025 — on my way to work this morning, I saw a wrapped CyberTruck with a Nevada UFC license plate. So if there are any mothers out there, trying to track down the SOB who’s not paying child support, I think I found your guy.
I know I’ve spoken on this before, but as a Nevadan, the carnage is right there out in the open for us. It truly is insidious. And I just needed an excuse to shout out the Get Played podcast, who, even though they have ads for a gambling website, they take more time and give the proper amount of weight when reading the fine print at the end of the ads.
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