'Dreams of You'

Things You Can't Control

Not everything makes sense, even with rational dissection with all of your might. That's the nature of trauma that people leave on your life. If you try and repress it, the repressed emotions come out in strange ways to screw you up or screw you over. Often the absence of people who were there one moment, and suddenly weren't leaves a surprising mark on your psyche.

Sometimes, there's no controlling what goes through one's mind. Sometimes, it's all just out of control and your pre-frontal consciousness is riding a wild scree.

You might try to rationalise it away, but what you feel is stubbornly what you feel. In turn, the things you then try to put out of your mind come and haunt you in your sleep in the guise of dreams. Sometimes the dreams are so close up and personal, you wake up in the middle of the night devastated and disoriented. It's kind of mad that way.

So, no, this song isn't about dreaming of a girl that one yearns for longingly; it's about the the rather uncomfortable moments of remembered trauma that come to you in your sleep. I'm really not one for romanticism in my lyrics.



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'I Told My Therapist About You'

Well, You Would Too If It Happened To You

There's some guy out there with a page on Facebook with the very same name. It's a pretty funny page. I saw the very name of the page and thought, "good heavens, that's exactly it, isn't it?"

Like it or lump it, some people are simply too traumatic to be around, and if you spend any amount of time with them, the trauma just grows. I could have written about my lousy ex-boss at the lighting company, who indeed was a class AAAAA asshole... (yes Iain Reed, I mean you, you fuckhead),

...but I'd rather not write about that.

As it turns out, I didn't really have a specific person in mind, or for that matter a scenario that would cause trauma, so I made one up and that ended being in the song. Note, I don't actually say what the traumatic event actually is, in the song, but you can well imagine it has something to do with mass murder and mayhem.



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'The Tedium of Medium'

Middle of the Pack

Not many people like coming second. God knows how it is to come in the middle of the pack. I never liked it, but if life is a race you run haphazardly into death, then heck, maybe it's alright to come middle of the pack? After all, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse is the provenance of the famous and beautiful. What are the rest of us mere mortals to do, but shuffle mindlessly with the crowd towards the day we shuffle off this mortal coil?

Then again, life in the middle of the pack can drive you nuts. It's hard enough staying with the throng for the duration of the race. A lot of people are full of everyday aggro based on their perceived lack of  excellent joy. Road rage and general hostility of the bustle of cities can be seen through the prism of everybody's anxiety just to stay in the middle. It hurts just to be ordinary, average, and mostly medium.

Life in the medium is exactly the life you don't see as the one you wanted. any human being with a modicum of self-respect wants something interesting in their life, but there is no guarantee we get those moments. And so we're hung with the tedium that comes from being in the medium.
This is a song about that phenomenon.

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'Intractable Difficulty'

Love-Goes-Wrong Songs

It's not easy coming up with new ideas for song lyrics. My usual fall back is to write about break ups.
This is possibly because I've been traumatised by mine in a way that the only way to come at it is through creativity, and really, does the world need another freakin' love song anyway?

While I think the world can do with more love songs in a way, I also think I'm probably not the best person to be contributing a whole bunch of those. From time to time I will have a song about falling in love or something, but at this point in my life, I think my strengths lie in writing songs about how love goes wrong.

In that light, the title is self explanatory. You like somebody and you've built your life round them being in your life, and somehow it's the worst thing you could have done because they take you for granted and they're going to just suck you dry; but you love them still. What is that? It's the kind of difficulty that can only be described as intractable.




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'Camouflage'

The Fine Line

There's a funny, fine line between applying makeup and then putting on a disguise. There's a funny, fine line between being the road and being on the run, avoiding issues back home. And just like that, there's a funny, fine line between simply dressing to blend in and being camouflaged.
Not that people want to go prodding around with definitions of what is what in the land of semantic calls and un-referenced opinions being thrown around like player cards.

Instead of writing any old love song, it struck me that might be interesting to write about the desire and the decision to cross the line. It's not like there are too many songs about such desires.
So here it is:



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'Nobody's Looking Now'

Goodbye iComp Edition

It's been over a month since iCompositions.com closed its virtual doors and all I can do is try and pick up the pieces. It's hard. We all relied on it being there in semi-perpetuity, and when you have something like that taken out of your life, you're forced to scramble.

By the way, apologies for being away a few weeks. Life, as it has a habit of doing, got in the way.

This track was written during the early years of my time at iComp. In fact it was written early in my time at the wretched Lighting Company with the shitty little boss, but hey, some of these things are linked together in a time for no good reason. It was more related to the fact that I binge-watched 'High Fidelity', 'Grosse Pointe Blank' and 'Being John Malkovich' with a friend.

That is to say, the concept of the song was to make it like some movie where you'd cast John Cusack. It's not really how I feel, it's supposed be how this character feels. The only problem is that people are wont to interpret songs as confessional and somehow illuminating the inner machinations of my emotional life. Uh, no. (You can got 'Kitsches fo Pain' for that sort of thing).
Unfortunately, this is not one of those songs.




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'Terrorist In My Neighborhood'

Giving The Benefit Of The Doubt

I don't like David Hicks. I don't like what happened to him at Guantanamo Bay either, and I sure don't like the War on Terror that has informed the first part of this century, but in the scheme of things David Hicks is still eminently dislikable. I don't know being dislikable is enough to get you tortured in camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, but I always suspected it couldn't have happened to a more deserving shit-head, and everybody wanting for him to return were misguided peaceniks, rallying around the worst shit-flag with the worst shit-cause.

Maybe another way of putting it is this: I don't like the death penalty either, but when applied to Shoko Asahara, it blunts my objections considerably. If they had the death penalty in Norway and applied it to Anders Brevik, I wouldn't mind. That they don't execute Brevik in Norway is a testament to Norway's level of civil progress, and maybe I'm too flexible in my beliefs about these things. They're clearly better people than I am.

Maybe David Hicks doesn't warrant being lined up with the likes of Asahara or Brevik, but to my mind there's no doubt he went to Afghanistan for some kind of military adventure and ended up paying for it heavily. His denials have always rung hollow, given everything else with which he was reported to have involved himself.

So at the barebones level of it, I found it really hard to argue against US torture in Guantanamo Bay leading with this white kid form South Australia. Other people? Sure. This guy? Puh-lease. It's a bit like arguing against the Death Penalty with  some C-Level Guard at a Nazi death Camp. How culpable were they? I dunno - but they sure meant to be there doing evil shit, that's why you'd stick them on trial. Hicks was culpable just by being there. how big that culpability was, I don't know, but he sure as fuck was up to no good.

Here's the crucial thing: Most civilian people on the planet that saw 9/11 unfold on TV did not think to themselves they needed to get to Afghanistan. He got exactly what he bargained for; he gets absolutely zero sympathy from me.

After the weird political deal that returned Hicks to Australia - god only knows who's face exactly was saved in all of it because nobody looked good - Hicks started living in my area. He was spotted shopping at the local supermarket. This prompted me to write this song.

I don't think he lives in the area any more. I believe he's back in South Australia, beating up on some other life partner. He's still a dick in my books.





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