My Mind

I didn't make this video, but I did write this song. I was dating a girl in high school and found out from a friend that she had swapped me out for another guy a couple weeks earlier. I was angry and depressed and about a million different things. My brain was the noisiest it had ever been in my life. So I locked myself in my room with my guitar and, like every teenager wanna-be musician, I wrote the saddest most depressing song about how my life was ruined and how I should die and all that garbage. It had the feeling of "Why did you crush my heart? I still love you and want you back. Am I ever worth the air I breathe? Waaaaaaaaa." You know, typical teenage melodrama.

So right after I finished singing all 400 verses dripping with dismal tears into my crappy tape recorder, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. I wasn't sad anymore. I was pissed. Again, very typical teenage melodrama. So I kept writing more lyrics. Only they weren't about how I should die, they were about how SHE should die, that rotten bitch. She broke my heart. MY heart. When I gave it to her to hold, I never said she could to THAT! What was she thinking? But the melody was too sad and slow to fit my new words, so I wrote a new one. Same chords, new melody.

A day later when I went back to listen to this intense cacophony of emotion, I couldn't decide which melody or set of lyrics I liked best. Since I had a 4 track recorder, I recorded both songs one on top of the other, and hard panned the vocals so the sad song was in the left speaker, and the the angry song was in the right speaker. That way, as my mood shifted, I'd just pan from left to right on my stereo and switch between the two versions of the song without missing a beat. As tapes of my music circulated a few years later, that song was shared with both versions playing at the same time. No one knew they were supposed to pan left or right, and so people just listened to both playing at the same time. Some people hated it. Others thought it was an interesting concept. Because really, that's how my mind was. It was noisy and cluttered and angry and sad all at the same time. It wasn't simple. It wasn't something you could understand in one listening. It was raw and confusing and gritty. So I have mixed feelings about this recording. Sometimes I pan to one side, and then replay it panned to the other side. Other times I let it play and remember how I felt writing this stupid song. But it really is a good representation of the conflict in my mind.