The Detritus downloads continue. Here’s an old track about winter and being bitter about others’ social lives and your own lack of one. I wrote it in 2006 for the “Lost in the Background” CD (the album title came out of the lyrics.) I didn’t include it in the end, partially because I couldn’t get over the obscure art-history reference I made to the daguerrotype by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, “The Boulevard du Temple” (1838). It was the first photograph ever taken of a person, simply because the long exposure time removed the moving crowds from the photograph, leaving only the single person who was standing still the whole time. This romanticized the idea of an anti-social artist to me.
[audio:a-saturday-night.mp3]they crowd into the streets
they fill up tables and their chairs
they laugh and smile among their friends
they walk around in pairs
they lose themselves in conversation
so young and alive
they’ll wake up in the morning, easy
everything is finebut somewhere there’s a lonely drifter
small among the crowds
he’s quiet in a corner
simply lost in the background
like a long exposure photograph
from the 19th century
of a Paris city street
he’s the one that you can seeI gaze outside the window at the cars and ice and snow
listening to the sounds from the apartment down below
I’ll place a melancholy CD in my bedroom stereo
the evening is still young, but it’s not like I would knowsomeone out there has found a lover
someone else refilled their drink
but I guarantee those crowded bars
won’t leave you room to think
yeah, but thinking’s got the best of me
I just wish I could relax
for now I’ll transfer nervous energy to the tape
in my fourtrack