Tuesday, February 7, 2012

[ BtS ] Running Barefoot

Most of the time I feel like I'm fighting with lyrics. Every line, every turn of a phrase is a battle between me and the sentiment I am trying to portray. Every rhyme is a sacrifice between poignance and necessity. Every verse is a ... Well, I'm sure you get the picture.

Running Barefoot is at the opposite end of that spectrum.

I can still remember sitting at the VAXA terminals in the computer lab between Oberlin's program houses - either the cute Apple Macintosh SE's or the dumb terminals we could access. It was there that this image of someone running barefoot through clouds popped into my head.

It was an interesting image: at first soft and serene. Yet it held a certain sort of coldness and aloofness, distance and melancholy.

I think I wrote all the lyrics there before I left for the night. My muse knocked and, for at least once in my life, I figured out how to let it flow.

Barefoot has always been an interesting song for me. The image of someone so beautiful that she can get anything she wants - fame, fortune, riches, admiration. And yet she's struggling to understand what it is she wants. She's afraid - afraid of ... something. And that fear traps her inside this cocoon of a world where it's simpler to take those things that come so easily...

And from a narrative point of view, it's sung from the point of view someone who sees through her. It unfolds with a sort of resigned compassion - knowing what is going on and, by that token, the narrator will probably never be let inside close enough to help.

The music followed suit - came together pretty quickly. I don't remember if it unfolded *quite* so easily. But in quite a short bit of time another tune was born.

The perhaps ironic point to the song is that it took us maybe one or two takes to nail the full-band sections of the song (and one SWEET-ASS solo from Jon!). Yet it took Jon and I about a gazillion tries to get that intro and outro down. Somewhere there's a gag/outtake compilation of some of the better moments.

I need to see if I can find that... LOL

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