18_Super Lyrics Time! (Part 1: The Fourth Wall)

These are some lyrics I wrote years ago for a song called "The Fourth Wall", which was part of a concept album I was working on:

"Your voice is fading
Drying like the ink that's on this page
As your memory bends at the corners
And doubles over
Into the double space"

They're pretty damn good, but the music never was.  The melody was cute, but it was a shameless attempt to copy Deathcab's Tiny Vessels.  (Still one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard, and worth trying to imitate, so give me some credit.)

I'm saying this because for a long time tonight, I stared at this page, writer's block consuming me.  (NOTE: You have to understand, the reason writers are so good at conveying emotion is because writer's block is the same problem that many non-writers have:  the inability to truly understand what it is you are really trying to say.  People do it every day, they sit and get angry or frustrated not because of something someone else has done, but because they don't know how to really put in to words what they are feeling.  Even if that something is a good thing.  Us writers, however, are used to it.  We're practiced at not having any idea of how to put into words what we are feeling.  So we are also practiced at breaking through those blocks.  Take that, world.)

And so, it took me a while to break through, until I remembered a conversation I had earlier tonight with one of my South African friends.  He broke up with his girlfriend (another close friend of mine down there) two months ago.  And I just found out about it tonight.

Faded voices.  Memories doubling over into the double space of long-distance communication.

That is how most of my information has come to me these days.  If not second-hand, than over the phone, or over the internet.  Rarely in person, rarely in a timely fashion.  My best friends have become voices on a phone, random oddly timed facebook chats, status updates and emoticon ridden texts.

I suppose it would be fine if it was good news, because there is no distance too great to stop good news from being awesome.  But bad news?  Quite the opposite.  Any distance, even arm's length, seems too great.

Strange that it seems like all the lyrics I wrote four years ago come back now to be relevant.  Maybe I was smarter back then.

- Kid