Track #7: St. Marys
I remember writing this song on the train in Italy heading down the coast from Cinque Terre to Rome. I started saying “This is a love letter” over and over to myself. I thought it was just an interesting thing to say. It’s kind of mournful and it’s kind of pleading. Desperate in a way. Because in a way, it’s saying, “why don’t you love me?”. Back then the song was about a drug and it was called Vicodin.
So one moral of this story is that, truly, to be a songwriter you don’t per se need an instrument. You just need to be able to conjure or reassemble melody in your head. You can work out everythiing else on an instrument later. This thing just came to me. And it came to me as many songs come to me. Which is as an idea. Almost an image. Or a feeling. Or a color. A sort of impulsive visual cognition that this (whatever this is or was) could be cool. There should be a song called ‘Vicodin’ and it should be a love letter. And so it was.
The point of the song was that for someone in chronic pain there is often no solace. There are no words of comfort nor are there people that can understand. What’s to understand? If you’re in pain all the time, real physical pain, exhausting pain, what can someone say to you that would make it better? Probably nothing. But maybe you can find solace, maybe you can find real friendship and real relief in the form of a pill. So it’s a love letter to a drug because, sometimes, that’s the only thing that can truly and actually make you feel better.
Anyway, that was the premise.
Drug songs can be cliche and obvious and so I felt it important to try and approach it from somewhat more subtle and different perspective. Treat the drug not as a cool hip thing, not as a hipster pose to counterculture, but actually talk to it like a friend or a confidant.
I like this song quite a bit. We used to play it in Lipstik and we liked it there too. You can do it any number of ways. You can make it a country rock song almost and sing some high lonesome harmonies over it or you can tear it apart and do it like a psyched-out rocker or whatever you want to call it.
When Paul and I sat down to go through it he was originally skeptical about calling it Vicodin and some other folks gave me the advice that it might be too obvious so I reconsidered and changed the name to St. Marys which is the name of the Pain Management Center in Rochester, Minnesota that my wife went to over a rough winter many years ago. I guess technically it’s the hospital that houses the center.
Originally the song had a bunch of different parts. It had a bridge showcasing one of my favorite little bridge chords, B7, and it had an outro that repeated the chorus but sang an opposing melody against the chorus. We decided, ultimately, that this version might be cool if we cut out all that fat and just focused on the verse and the chorus and then let everything else degenerate.
So that’s what we did.
This was a fun song to do in the studio. Pete got out his Mick Ronson/Bowie chops and tried to create a hazy psychadelic huge guitar sound, Matt banged away on the keys and Bill and Rob locked it down with some pounding rhythm. Over the top is my traditional wearied weathered singing. As always, I am in search of the tension between a gentle, aching weariness, a wistful sweetness, and the tension, anxiety and noise underneath. That conflict is something I most enjoy in music. That tension and dissonance.
It came out nicely and a lot of people gravitate towards this song. It’s more upbeat, it’s more of a rocker and, if you’ve sat through Hold My Heartache and maybe Dirty White Coats and you’re taken to the urge of exercising some demons, it might just do the trick.
The chorus was originally written as a more explicit ode to Vicodin and the words make slightly more sense in that context. They are:
When noone’s listening you do
When I’m on fire you’re cool
When I was fixing you’re smooth
When we play this live I alternate between singing the two different refrains (either Vicodin or Saint Marie), It works as a big band but I also kind of like it in a different context, stripped bare and lonely with just a little taste of electric guitar atmosphere and residue, which is how we did it at R Bar the other night.
The chords are: G-C-Am-F in the verse, and thee chorus is C-Am-G and then Am-C-G on the last part. The bridge, if you want to play it is B7-C-Am-G (I think). Here’s a really old demo from the Music Club (sent out through the email list) if you want to take a listen: [click here]
-
Guy Misterioso
-
theflyingchange
-
guymisterioso
-
theflyingchange
