"His then-girlfriend had left him, left him with a black eye. She had cheated on him and sucker-punched his face in the lobby of a downtown venue after an REM show. Those lines 'I write your name/Drive past your house/Your boyfriend's over/I watch the lights go out'... he lived that. You could read his depression as clearly as his words. He was wrecked by drink and heartbreak. Big dark circles under his eyes. His parents had intervened; got him help. But it didn't help much.
He strummed carefully on a Gibson electric that wasn't plugged in because the pawn shop had his amp. Lyrics were neatly arranged chicken scratches on the back of a crumpled show flier.
He stopped. "This won't make any sense without the bassline." So he plucked out the bass part. "The droning fifth on the pre-chorus will make the singer sound like God," he said. He stopped again because he was so proud of the "AM radio" reference in the lyric. He repeated it."
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"His then-girlfriend had left him, left him with a black eye. She had cheated on him and sucker-punched his face in the lobby of a downtown venue after an REM show. Those lines 'I write your name/Drive past your house/Your boyfriend's over/I watch the lights go out'... he lived that. You could read his depression as clearly as his words. He was wrecked by drink and heartbreak. Big dark circles under his eyes. His parents had intervened; got him help. But it didn't help much.
He strummed carefully on a Gibson electric that wasn't plugged in because the pawn shop had his amp. Lyrics were neatly arranged chicken scratches on the back of a crumpled show flier.
He stopped. "This won't make any sense without the bassline." So he plucked out the bass part. "The droning fifth on the pre-chorus will make the singer sound like God," he said. He stopped again because he was so proud of the "AM radio" reference in the lyric. He repeated it."