Gafoo’s Blog

Complicated.mp3

Why must things be so complicated?
I can feel you walk away from me.
You know you make me so damn frustrated.
Run your circles and come back gracefully.

All we are is one that came unglued
I’ll keep you far but still…

You make these things so complicated
Sensitivity abated you.
Such silly things will make you jaded.
I laugh to know that I am just like you.

This is the last thing I have recorded alone since 2002. I did it a few days after Christmas with my acoustic guitar (and later added electric) and Matt’s microphone since I didn’t have an actual Shure SM-57 mic of my own and since it was just sitting at my house since we we tracking drums at the time for our album (that we never finished). This song was a regular for The Bessemer Process except that we hadn’t performed for a long time cause I never wrote lyrics. Standard fare for Matt and I since we came up with song structure right away, then melody, then sing bullshit lyrics for months before a show came up and had to actually sit down and write actual lyrics before the show. Well anyway, when I recorded it, the lyrics were actually done and we had been playing it at shows for a few months. It was actually a band favorite since it had the huge thrash section in the middle and end. It was ridiculous to come up with that cause I had the bulk of the song but not that part yet. I remember telling Matt that the song was needing something to kick up the energy level. Being that Bo was a metal drummer and David could really bust out a 80’s metal style solo, I decided to try playing a retarded metal riff. For some reason, we all latched onto it and that was the song. We would use this song to end shows and the last metal section we would extend and play faster and faster until we couldn’t go any faster and then all of sudden we would go super slow and just jump up and down screaming and playing as loud as we could. Then we you think we can’t play anymore, we jump into it again even faster than before until finally it just turns all to mush. Anyone who has ever seen it live knows that it was as fun to watch as it was for us to play it.

As for the lyrics, now I know a lot of you probably going to read the lyrics and think that they are about a girl who made my life too complicated or something like that. You are dead wrong. They are actually about one of my bandmates and his propensity to make songs that were too hard to play. If we were able to remember all the chord changes and time changes and mood shifts and play it all together even then it would be too complicated for the average Jerry’s audience. The lyrics are mainly about that and me reminicsing about how I used to be exactly like that. I used to write songs that were so ridiculously hard that I sometimes couldn’t even play them. Not that I am against difficult music but I realized a long time ago that unless you had really gifted musicians it was going to be hard to make it work. All the musicians need to be able to play it and they also need to know how to communicate it to the audience. For that, they all have to “get it” and that is actually really hard to come by. I learned this lesson a while ago but my bandmate hadn’t figured it out yet so I busted out these lyrics in honor of him. It’s not a knock by any means. It’s just an observation of what was going on around me. For the record, this song was written and titled before I had ever heard of Avril Lavigne and her song “Complicated” and in my defense, her song actually is about some guy who is making her relationship complicated. SO THERE!!!