Everyday I Climb The Hill

The headline of this post is the chorus of a song I wrote called "Everyday."

I wrote the music about a year, or so, ago, when we were in Cape May, NJ. It was a bouncy upbeat sort of thing, acoustic-based, fun. Stella liked it, and usually that means it's pretty good! I remember her dancing around on the porch of our rented beach house. It's a fond memory.

The lyrics came about six months ago when I was, there's no other way to say this, locked into a deep, deep depression. They are as uplifting as I could make them at the time, which was not very. (And some were cribbed from Dylan Thomas: Hey, steal from the best!) Here they are:

"Everyday"
Taking the blue pill everyday
Thank god for pharmacology
Keeps the noon-day demons at bay
I didn't use to feel this way

Pre-Chorus
Well I won't go gentle into that good night
I will rage against the dying of the light

Verse 2:
Up the hill the stone I push
Feel a lot like Sisyphus
Falls to the bottom whenever I reach the top
Keep on pushing I can't let myself stop

Pre-Chorus:
Well I won't go gentle into that good night
I will rage against the dying of the light (sing 2X)

Chorus:
Everyday I climb the hill
Don't know if I'll get there I don't think I ever will
Didn't use to feel this way
But I'm gonna keep on pushing, keep on climbing everyday

Verse 3:
Brought a child into this world
The bluest eyes you'll ever see
She's my darling sweet little girl
It's no longer just about me

Chorus and out

So that's the song, kind of an upbeat downer when you hear it. When I have a decent recording of it, I'll post it. I like it, although I don't feel like we, the band, Bottle Cap Manifesto, have it 100% down yet. (It's the bridge that's kind of hanging us up.) When we play it live, which we've done a few times now, it doesn't feel as confessional as it reads on the page, but I guess that's the beauty of music, the blues even. Sharing the dark stuff can become positive, or more positive, when its in communion with others, the band, the audience, the universe, the Hindu floaty thing. (The last reference is an inside joke to Randi, and comes from the truly, truly strange documentary "Grizzly Man." If you haven't seen it yet, get it right now. It cannot be described adequately, in its full awesomeness, by me tonight.)

And the sheer repetitive fact of practice makes me less self conscious about the song too. By the 50th time we've played it in practice it no longer feels like reading a diary entry and more like constructing and deconstructing a mechanical object, cutting it down, refining, memorizing the words so I no longer think about them.

But ... the part about Stella gets me every time I sing it. As it should.

And I don't take a blue pill everyday, just so you know. That's what they call poetic license. It's white. :-)