Anybody But You

Write What You Know

There's that old adage about what one should write about bring what one knows, and what one knows well is mostly their own dumb opinions. Your preoccupations tend to come to the fore a lot even when you're not conscious of letting them out the door. The Beatles for instance wrote a lot about love, presumably because they had a lot of interest and insight into love. In my case I tend to write about relationships that fail and the terrible breakups the ensue. 

This might be because I have a lot more knowledge in this area. I'm not saying I had a lot more misfortune in this area than other people, but ... I did get to see a lot of people behaving very badly on their way out of relationships, so much so that I find that I'm not exactly short on fodder here. There are a lot of shitty people walking the face of this earth and they don't even know just how shitty they are - but when they do their shitty thing, they have no shame or remorse, they justify it so well to themselves, they carry on as if there's nary a problem. Really appalling human beings doing some terrible things. I used to wonder how they lived with themselves but truth be known, they're mostly okay with the carnage they leave behind. 

All of us writing songs are in the wake and slipstream of the Beatles, and so we do have to bend our minds a little bit towards love. One thing I will say about love is that it is hard to fake it. It's really hard to fake liking something you do not. When it comes to another human being? Even more so. 

Therefore even in the worst relationships and their breakups, it's not like love doesn't figure into it somehow. Even if the other person is a psychopath manipulating you to their ends they probably still like you on some level if they're bothering with the charade of love. That said, it is possible for people to kid themselves into thinking they like somebody more than they really do. It's a hard facade to keep going. People eventually tire of it and break down. It's really in those instances that one wonders if love is real at all. 

Some of these things are unknowable and you can only unpack them years later. When you do, you might find that it was more projection than love. 

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