On Every Step of Our Stair

“On Every Step of Our Stair” (2004), from Poison Against Poison.

There’s glass in my hand

I’m spilling into the sand

My wife won’t understand

When she hears this

I stumble back on the street

And our eyes meet

I get weak in the feet

And I’m down

I hear the breeze sound

My hair hits the ground

It seems we’re found

From that shouting

I see your chest rise

And your beautiful thighs

My sight’s compromised

So I stop looking

I hear someone’s words

They mix with calling birds

But from what think I have heard

They’re getting distant

Now I wish I knew

If I were false or true

To whomever of you

I was meant for

In my wife’s curling hair

On every step of our stairs

I think there’s more there

Than I’d noticed

I recall that hotel

And your perfume’s smell

Could my wife tell

I’d gone missing?

My hands grab the dirt

I imagine your skirt

And I think this must hurt

But I can’t feel it

I see the world through a veil

As my eyesight fails

I feel I’m entering a jail

Without exit

I feel myself shift

And my body lifts

But I’m gone in some drift

And I’ll stay here

If I could I’d shout:

I sold everything out

I’ve got nothing but doubt

From this miserable tryst

I had had this tune in mind for some time before I finished “Chevy w/Balding Tires” in 2003.  I’d thought of it as the last tune on the record, and keeping with the Riverside County location (the album, it should be noted, consisted of songs that all took place in and around Riverside, CA: I’d for some time wanted to do for my town, Riverside, what Joyce did for Dublin), I imagined the car accident in the tune taking place on the 60 freeway heading east just before you exit on Nason St. in Moreno Valley.  Nason was the exit I took to get to the first school I worked at, so the stretch was very vivid in my mind, and still is.  Why I’d use it for this purpose I won’t try to understand too deeply, but that’s nonetheless what I’d pictured in my head.

In any event, I have a version–I would have to dig it up and I think remix it–of “The Caddy,” which currently closes the record in a solo, acoustic version, all done up with a full arrangement, including me playing my patented faux-mambo drums.  I’d intended, actually, to re-record the version I’d finished, to give the arrangement a bit more in terms of dynamics, so the thing I have is not what would have ultimately been released anyway.  The instrumental on the record, “My Favorite Recipie (for Dawn)” would not have been included, though I’d have definitely made it available at some point, and “The Caddy” would have been a strong tune somewhere in the middle of the album, probably the late middle.  “On Every Step of Our Stair” would have been a great closer, I think, in hindsight a bit predictable, as it has a sort-of-1967 climaxing arrangement, or one with my flavor in any event, but a strong one nonetheless, because the tune is quite good, to me a better tune than “The Caddy,” in fact.

My problem was that I’d started hitting something of a wall in my writing, trying to keep everything as taut as possible while at the same time fitting things in thematically to the album.  For the life of me, I couldn’t finish the tune, and for over a year it was very incomplete.  One summer, I did the one tour I’ve ever done, driving up the California coast and doing a few gigs, and playing “The Caddy,” which I’d never thought of as a solo number, felt actually quite good, and I got a good solo arrangement for it, enough so that I, very sensibly, decided that the record, without “On Every Step of Our Stair” (which at the time didn’t have a title yet), was in fact finished.  When I got home from that “tour,” I cut the version of “The Caddy” that’s on the record, inserted “My Favorite Recipe,” and declared it done.

After finishing the record, I went into something of a post-partum depression–not to make light of the real thing–because I had this great piece of work that was done on terms I didn’t really yet know how to deal with, commercially.  I spent a lot of time printing Chevy up, promoting it, etc., when really, in hindsight, my time would have been much better spent finishing this tune and recording it the weekend after I declared Chevy done.  The tune waiting a good six months or more–memory fades–before I sat to work with it.  Bear in mind, this makes it about a year and a half this tune isn’t finished.  The writing, once I got to it, took about two or three weeks of jotting down lines here and there, but fairly diligently.  The tune is quite detailed, but it had nested for so long in my head that I had a good grasp of it in its detail.

The actual recording, when I got it it, is one of the best products I think I’ve done, in terms of getting not only a good tune, but a good arrangement and performance, to a final product.  This was one of the last two tunes I recorded using Cubase, on which I recorded all of Chevy–the other is “Making the Papers,” also on Poison Against Poison–and of the two it is the better.  I never really got the hang of Cubase for whatever reason, partially because it would at times run a bit buggy on my Mac.

I have had a few blind alleys, musically, in my life, that I’ve started to creep down but didn’t travel, so to speak, fully, and this recording is the only example I have of one of them.  I have been a Brian Wilson fanatic since the big press push for his first solo album in 1988, and I fairly quickly after that discovered the whole mythology of “Smile,” which he of course has since finished, to great effect in my opinion.  This was not at all recorded like Smile, sections of tunes recorded at different times and likely different places, and then edited together to create a whole, but I got it in my head that it would be interesting to do a record where the arrangement and instrumentation of the tunes changed not tune to tune, but verse to verse.  This recording does precisely that, and while I can’t see making an entire record that way–it might be intellectually appealing and thus gain some hipster cred–none of the records I really love were ever made that way, beginning with an intellectual proposition and then fitting tunes into it.  The best ones have the intellectual proposition flow from some tunes, from a process already begun, and then in turn re-stimulate the process with the intellectual propostion.  In any event, each of the verses in this recording uses a different arrangement, to great effect.

This was the last recording I made using my Fender Rhodes, which I sold when we moved to Dakar.  I miss the instrument, to be sure, and its voice is on loads of my recordings.  It’s the only instrument I’ve ever parted with that I sometimes wish I still had.  Space is an issue here, to be sure.  I’m considering a harmonium for my keyboard, as I can’t really play an accordion, depending on the cost.

I’d note, to finish, that Poison Against Poison is the only thing I’ve done that is not available to download freely under a Creative Commons license.  Yes, it must be purchased as a physical CD.  It is, as the web page will indicate, my “box set,” not in a box, but a book, assembled by hand, including everything I released on General Ludd Music between 1992 and 2005, except Chevy w/Balding Tires, which I’d thought at the time stood nicely on its own and which I wanted people to buy separately to try to get rid of a few of the CDs I’d had printed up.  It’s a very nice product, and something where actually holding it in your hand while you listen is worthwhile.  So, if you like my stuff, it’s a good way to go.  This is one of a handful of tunes on Poison that aren’t on any of my other albums, and likely I will as time passes write posts about the others and make the recordings available on this blog.  I’m not holding on to them for profiteering, but Poison was intended to be a physical product, and a physical product it will remain.