Singled Out: The Luxury

A lot of the songs I've written have a sort of feel-good melody and rhythm with just absolutely dour and depressing lyrics, or sarcasm floating under the surface of something genuine. In this one, I was trying to marry the two.

I'd been with someone off and on for a good six years, and as luck would have it I finally hit the epiphany wall and realized she could possibly be the ONE, just a few short months after she finally gave up on me. So there was a massive blender of conflicting emotions in my own head, coming to grips with all the things I'd said and done over the years, trying to reconcile what a bastard I'd been with how much I wanted it to work out in the end.

I was a mess, and I wound up making a fool of myself, being way too intense, trying to find a balance between properly saying all the things I never really said and being an over-the-top, gushing disaster. So the song came from the two voices in my head, one believing that we were "too big and too good to fail", and the other feeling resigned that we were "guided by the great, gaping hole in our sails" - we were destined to crash regardless of how beautiful we were supposed to be together in my own mind.

The bridge, or middle bit, was a sort of acknowledgement that no matter how private one would hope this would be, there were plenty of people watching, taking sides, offering sage advice with no end game ("everyone's an expert and nobody knows"). And the chorus is just a sort of self-rebuking, sarcastic refrain - whining for someone to show some real emotion but knowing damn well that it's everything you've said and done that made them shut down on you.

All that said, it's probably the bounciest, happiest-sounding thing I've ever written.