Songs: Falling For Trust

notes / gigs / releases

When she was six she saw her world collapse
When she was seven she had to learn to grow up fast
She got a dictionary so she could look up names
That you'd never think she ought to know, not at that age

She shut herself up in her mind and in her room and then
Decided that she'd never ever fall
Fall for trust again

When she was growing up she kept herself apart
She scorned society and found herself in books and in art
She got a good degree, so she could know the names
Of the dead who painted pictures in another age

She didn't see the point in trying to make friends
Because she knew she'd never ever fall
Fall for trust again

But then she let down her guard and let somebody in
She took a chance and saw a world which she thought was a dream
Threw out her dictionary and all the ghosts she'd named
And found a truer art that can't put upon a page

And when that chapter of her life came to an end
At least she knew it was OK to fall
Fall for trust again

Don't waste time sitting alone inside and thinking
Go get outside because life's a pint you should be drinking

This Is Not A Library
This Is Not A Library
This Is Not A Library
This Is Not A Library

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

Here's a song with a VERY long and tortured musical history. It was originally written MANY years ago as a way of putting a bit of a Positive Spin on a GHASTLY relationship I'd just come out of (the same one that "You Will Be Hearing From My Solicitor" and especially "The Only Thing" are rather LESS sanguine about), trying to say that even though that relationship had (thank you merciful God!) come to an end, at least it had shown me that I could allow myself to trust someone In That Way, and that the whole world WOULDN'T come crashing to an end if something went wrong afterwards.

What's that you say? The person detailed in the song is a woman? Ah yes, my friend, bare witness to INFINITE CUNNING! As you can see, the subject matter was RATHER sensitive (the first couple of verses especially deal with subject matter that we won't dwell on any further) and so I tried to DISGUISE it a bit. Also, more to the point, I didn't want to sound like a whinging git singing "Feel my PAIN!", so again I thought putting it into the third person would make it a bit more sympathetic. It's SONGWRITING, baby!

The end bit is a bit of CRAFT too, as it's Future Me From The End Of The Song passing down some WISDOM to Little Me From The Start. When I was a teenager I was very much the sort of person who sat inside reading words "from dead men to their kind" (WORDSWORTH) rather than getting out and EXPERIENCING life. I was also the kind of teenager who'd pretentiously try and quote POETRY in order to show off, and usually get it wrong. Hard to believe, I know. Anyway, this end section was phrased slightly differently in the original version and didn't have the "This Is Not A Library" refrain - that bit STRUCK me suddenly after we'd recorded the basic track, when I was first considering that phrase as a recurring MOTIF (I've already quoted Wordsworth, I might as well go for broke) to encompass the main ideas of the album.

The original tune to this song is lost way back in the depths of time, and the words got attached to all sorts of chord progressions over the span of a couple of years, MANGLED to fit in each time. The version of the song that went out to The Validators was the third or fourth such attempt to fit the words to a tune, and although it was the same basic chords as the final version, it was much slower and, frankly, WEEDY. It didn't even have a chorus, for pity's sake.

This was before The Mighty Rhythmn Section got their hands on it though... the usual METHOD for working up a song is that I give everyone a tape, play it through in the practice room, and then The Mighty Rhythmn Section try to make some sense of it - once they have finished showing off to each other with Fall Riffs, that is (generally nowadays Tom and Emma's ARRANGEMENTs get worked out later on through a process of me waving my arms around and then them going home to try something else instead). Nearly every time we do this we end up indulging in PUNK SKA versions of EVERYTHING for a LAUGH, but this time I thought "Wait! Hold On! Why not actually DO it this way?" and, despite the protestations of ROB (who preferred the weedy version - I make no comment) that's what we did. During this transformation the "ba ba ba ba ba" bit BEEFED itself up and became the DeFacto Chorus, which was handy. Singing that was ACE - I have a distinct memory of everyone trying, and failing, to sing and do NUTTY DANCING simultaneously, bless. I had to do MY vocals in two halves, singing alternate lines, as I KEEL over whenever I try to sing it live.

In summary, it's really one of the most serious songs here, with a subject matter which means rather a lot to me, but the point of the song is that you CAN come through grim times and DOOM and into much MUCH happier times, so why not sing about it via the most GRATE medium for Joyful Music the world has ever known? Eh?