(ME FOR YOU is now known as A LITTLE MORE THAN ME. That story’s in a blog above.)
ME FOR YOU started out on an August afternoon out on the back deck with a frosty drink and a little travel guitar. I was reflecting back on a dream I’d had the night before in which I’d been able to sing amazing high harmonies in whatever key was thrown at me. This was a particularly cruel dream in that I’d been fighting a throat infection and my voice was currently more akin to the sound of a chair in which I was seated being scraped across pressure treated wood.
But like many songs, ME FOR YOU began with a strummed chord and the first words that popped into my head. And then it stopped.
The fact that I couldn’t sing without coughing didn’t help. I carried the one line around for a few days and the next time I took a crack at it, the outline of the melody showed up. I was thinking about the distance between aspiration and actual performance and the whole thing, lyric and tune, flowed from there.
I premiered this song solo on LOOM, the online open mic and then went on to close my “solo Comets” set at the Cleveland Gathering with it as well. That would make this, while not exactly the song’s premiere, certainly the premiere of the actual, unbumbled lyric.
So it began solo, as they most often do, and it stayed solo for a while but I always heard Buck’s guitar on it in my mind. But not much else did. Inspired by the stripped down performances of most of the performers on LOOM and at the Cleveland Gathering, we decided that we needed to do a few tunes based just our guitars and voices.
OK, so we cheated. There’s a bass and brushed drums on there and a harmonium holding a note from each chord. But I play one guitar and Buck plays one guitar and that’s the core of it. We hope you like the sparser sound because there is more of it to come.
Someone asked me who the “You” in the song is. I’m not entirely sure. It could be a loved one, it could be the imagined audience, it could even be me. It’s likely all of the above because pastiche is such a big part of the stuff I write. Lyric writing involves the folding of time and space and the morphing of humans, real and imagined, into a single little snapshot. Some of it’s real some of it’s not. It’s kind of like Photoshop for words.
Someone else asked me who the folks name-checked in the song are. Hey folks, that’s why God made Google! Feel free to uncover them all—this may be the first blog that gives out homework!
They all really mean something to me and it would be a massive coincidence if they held the same weight for you. But honestly, that doesn’t matter. They’re not there to be celebrated, although they’re all certainly worthy of celebration, they’re there to remind us that we all have heroes, or unconscious mentors or spirit guides or whatever you want to call them that inspire us. Their accomplishments point the way up the path to our best work and our better selves.
Now that I think of it, I believe you call a person like that an artist.
David Partridge