Sometimes A Song Is Your Only Friend

Start at the top, play to the end

Sad boy with Rickenbacker and spent 2-liter of Big Red, 25th and Nicollet, 1992.

When I first moved to Minneapolis in 1992, I wound up in an apartment on 25th and Nicollet, across the street from what is now the Spyhouse Coffee shop.

When the landlord showed me the building, he gave me two options. I could either have:

1. a garden level one-bedrom apartment with its own bathroom/shower and a fireplace for $385 a month, or

2. a 2nd floor studio apartment with a shared toilet & bathtub in a closet in the hallway for $220 a month.

Being unemployed and generally thrifty, I went with the studio apartment for $220 a month.

In reality, I was a cheap bastard who didn’t understand the value of privacy and was paranoid about garden level.

I was happy to learn (eventually) that if I wanted to actually shower and not take a bath, I could walk two doors down in the rowhouse and use a shower on the second floor.

I had just returned from a stint in Germany where I’d moved after college graduation¹ and wound up driving a truck for a bit. I’d managed to save a couple thousand bucks driving and headed back to the states, thinking I’d set up shop as a poet in the Twin Cities.

I was sad.

My romantic aspirations had been thwarted upon arrival and I was a pathetic schlub.

In that apartment on 25th and Nicollet², I sat and listened to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” over and over.

I kept picking up the needle and dropping it back at the beginning of the record.

This song made me feel better and helped the passing time seem less lonely.

It's getting to the point where I'm no fun anymore
I am sorry
Sometimes it hurts so badly I must cry out loud
I am lonely

I could really relate to those lyrics by Stephen Stills.

I was also reading Letters to Yesenin by Jim Harrison over and over again at this time.

So great, so great.

---

By 2006, my heart had healed several times over and I was living in a warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis.

The warehouse was huge and cheap, but it was another situation where you had to go a couple doors down to take a shower.

On June 27, 2006, I recorded this demo idea for “Sometimes A Song Is Your Only Friend,” which is today’s addition to the “Mixed Up Files” record.

When I recorded this, I was thinking about my sad time on 25th and Nicollet.³

I recently came across this song/mixed-up-file in a folder called “garageband silliness of 06 mainly.”

I recorded the first bit of the song with guitar, playing directly into the built-in mic on the laptop,⁴ and then tried making up some lyrics just as a spoken word thing.

My roommate at the time, 84 Caprice⁵, called me while I was attempting this spontaneous bop prosody.

My phone (pictured below) was sitting on the table next to the laptop as I recorded.⁶

His phone call interrupted the recording process, and the song remains unfinished, which is my fault, not his.

This is the phone that rings at the end of the track.

The following year, Wilco released a great song called “What Light.”

Something about that Wilco song reminded me enough of “Sometimes A Song Is Your Only Friend,” that I thought people would surely find my idea to be too derivative if released, so there it has sat in that folder since 2006.

That is part of why I’ve started this “Mixed Up Files” project: it feels good to let go of ideas the way it sometimes feels good to let go of feelings.

And perfect can be the enemy of good.

OX&C,

Faux Jean

Here are the lyrics:

Sometimes a song is your only friend

You start at the top and play till the end

Over and over and over again

Your friend is true

Time means nothing to you

Time means nothing to you (huh?)

Sometimes a song is your only friend

You start at the top and play till the end

Over and over and over again

Your friend stays true to you

Spoken:

Sometimes a song is your only hope

You sit on the couch and stare at the rope

Lamenting what seems to be a lack of dope

Your song make you smile

Time seems like the enemy

Time seems to prey

Time seems like an eternity

But time is only 3:33

*phone rings

(oh! Cornelius)

Sometimes a song is your only recourse

To finding sanity and remorse . . .

Hello?

"Hey Schindler."

1. (UW-Madison ‘91, woot woot!)

2. Which rhymes with “tickle-it” if you’re in Minnesota, and “Pickle-eh.”

3. And though “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is over seven minutes long, I refer to the healing song being three minutes and thirty-three seconds long. Here is a playlist of songs that are exactly 3:33 on Youtube.

4. Which is why it sounds so crunchy.

5. 84 Caprice (aka Cornelius Noll) has done a ton of cool stuff and taught me a ton about music production in the digital realm.

6. Now these were simpler times, see?