FAWM: February Album Writing Month 2004

numero 1 - dusty boxes - .wma file here
i'm submitting this so that FAWM seems slightly less like matthopper.com

this is definitely a song that wouldn't've seen completion were it not for FAWM...
the crucial last line is missing. written between 10 and midnight last night.
i'll comment more later...
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(LATER)
well, i haven't grown to love this song, but if this turns out to be the worst of my fawm collection, i'll be pleased. i wrote all the words before thinking of a melody, which is something i rarely do. i sat down at a coffeehouse and tried to think of something appropriate for the first song of the project. i was doing some preemptive thinking, realizing how i'm really glad to have some of the things that i've forced myself to write in the past. some of them evoke memories and images more strongly than anything else can. and then i personified that into a girl, as i usually do. thought about somebody come and gone, and people scrounging around for the tiniest shred to remember her by. a tiny bit of that came out in the words.

i started to play a really simple melody on guitar, which i then realized was almost identical to a piece of billy joel's "just the way you are". but i kept it. and as i sang it, i just kept feeling like i was singing an old michael stipe song. in the end, i think the billy joel part mostly got lost, but i was hoping to sound even more like stipe. i figured if i'm gonna fight something, why fight that?

dusty boxes
in the canyon where we congregated
storylines went unrelated
    remembered just enough to make it back for one more round.
unors field used to be the scene
summer nights and in between
  no one cared too much about the past, till she came to town.

no one even saw her coming
even though the skies were humming
  long before she blew through here and it blew up in your face.
and in her consciousness we congregated
she's the day we celebrated
  and then you realized she'd come and gone without a trace.

  a dusty box of dolls, broken shuttlecocks and basketballs,
  she's got dusty boxes somewhere
  now the people that adore her scour every shady corner
  for the story how she made it over here from over there

do you remember how it felt back then?
stumbling home and back again
  never know what trinkets from today tomorrow saves
all our feet hard on the throttle
all the messages and bottles
  and we always went for distance when we tossed them to the waves

the documents to bring to light
the truth about the darkest night
  those dusty tongues just chuckle, and they hold their secrets well
in the attics where they're relegated
waiting to be liberated
  wondering if time will ever come for them to tell

  a dusty box of bones, broken radios and polished stones
  she's got dusty boxes somewhere
  a gray and fading photograph, a fossil of the way she'd laugh...