december
Release Date: 4/01
Album: LUDLOW 6:18
Writer: ADAM MARSLAND
Lyrics:
I might just explode with cold
It's raining again today
The inside and outside of my head
Turning grey
Four pathetic weeks
The death of an era
Suicidal and bleak
Hope I didn't depress you
Ten shopping days 'til Christmas
And what a horrible way to die
Lying face up in a snowbank
Letting epithets fly
Brown sky
Why I?
This is what they call a crush
When the inside of your rubbers
Fill with slush
And the crushee blubbers
Now I curse the rain
It's heaven spitting on me
Emblematic of pain
Watching idiots suffer
Ten shopping days 'til Christmas
And what a horrible day to live
While the stupid happy world doth play
What I wouldn't give
For a sleigh
On the way
to January
Adam sez:
This was the first song written for LUDLOW 6:18, not counting "The Foghorn" which was recycled from pre-Cockeyed Ghost days. It actually dates from late 1998. L.A. songwriter Wendie Colter had a regular music night at Highland Grounds called "Third Thursdays" and her theme for Christmas '98 was that everyone had to come in with a new seasonal song. I had just written this lyric so I just went right out and wrote the music to it on the piano. I remember when I taught it to the band I put all the chords on a huge white board and they basically read it. We played it a lot on the SCAPEGOAT FACTORY tour (as a proxy for some of the more complicated songs on that album that we weren't confident we could pull off live) and it was pretty well ingrained in our heads for the LUDLOW sessions.
The lyrics to the song are so over-the-top depressing they're not meant to be taken seriously. In my mind the singer is a 20-something shoegazer dude who is too intellectual to take his own feelings seriously. Hence the over-erudition (who the hell uses the word "doth" anymore?) and the sense of emotional detachment.
Basically, I just don't like this guy very much.
This is the only Cockeyed Ghost track that has no guitar on it.