About
Key of C, Tempo 110
7/28/80, College Station
A love song written for a girl who drove me truly crazy at the time. I really debated including this song, along with its sibling “Happiness”, in the set, because well, I’m really not sure if they are any good or just really embarrassing. In the end, I decided to include because songs like this reflect who I was at the time – an easily wounded romantic who wrote reams of love poetry for any girl willing to give him the lazy eye. The words are what they are – unedited from what I scrawled furiously in my journal that night, probably as I was weeping and staring at a fading polaroid of the girl. I mean, who but an acne-scarred teenage boy in love could write, “O baby, the torment, as into my heart you rip…”
Musically, I spent a lot of time trying to direct attention away from my voice by burying it in as lush an arrangement as I could assemble. The foundation of the song is a circle of fifths chord progression recorded on piano in GarageBand, then imported into Logic Pro X. This was one of the first songs where I really began to explore the library of vocal loops in Logic, trying desperately to find background vocals that added color and nuance to my voice, especially on that repeating chorus of (you guessed it), “You know I love you, I really love you…”, probably an homage to Ms. Olivia Newton-John.