Singled Out: Auditorium

I was fiddling around on the guitar in my old bedroom in North Hollywood. Usually, if I'm trying to actually write a song, the last thing I do is fiddle around on my guitar…it's a sure-fire recipe for me to come up with absolutely nothing. 99% of the songs I've written have first come to me when I'm doing something absurdly mundane; washing my hands, taking the garbage out, fixing myself some rice and beans.

So, I'm fiddling around on the guitar…and all of a sudden, without even thinking about what I was doing, I began playing the chords to the verses and singing the vocal melody over it. Bam. Just like that. I couldn't believe it. It was so against my usual songwriting process that for a few minutes I doubted whether I'd come up with an original melody, or I was just ripping something off I heard on the radio. Making me even more skeptical was the fact that I'd instantly started singing the first lines of the song (Here's Charley, he's a defector, I will never, ever, ever let him infect her). Lyrics are usually the very last thing I write for a song, so it seemed doubtful to me that these words had magically tumbled out of my brain.

After half-convincing myself that I, in fact, was the composer of this song, I immediately decided to record a rough sketch of it…just in case it happened to really belong to me. I worked all afternoon, figuring out the basic structure, and experimenting with different ways of singing the chanting that opens the song and returns before the second verse. I'm sure my next-door neighbors thought I was murdering a small whale or exotic bird…let me tell you, those chants sound mighty bizarre when you're hearing them without the benefit of music.

Of all the songs on the album, I've been asked about the lyrics to this one the most. Not to sound like some sort of hippie wizard or something, but the truth is, I sort of let the song write the lyrics for me. The first lines that came out of me when I was fiddling around on the guitar really determined everything that came afterward. I wrote all the lyrics in that same afternoon, and they all came so naturally that I simply decided to never second-guess them. The song is a story, told by a narrator who seems to think higher of himself than the characters in the tale. However, in the final verse, the narrator describes himself, and seems to be rather similar to the characters he'd been putting down...maybe even worse than them. Or maybe he really is better than them. Or maybe he's simply accepting the fact that he's the same as them. When I hear the song now, the lyrics always mean something a little different to me. And like the rest of the song, I've simply learned to accept that I'll never know exactly how or why I wrote them.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album - right here!

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