Gafoo’s Blog

Sleep Before I Die.mp3

Love when will we be not wielding neon flashlights or is that the way it is?
Lifes imagine a nations running wild and rampant Will I sleep before I die?

We have been here before
We have been here before
We have been dead before
Inside your head

I need a space to live and grow in. A star struck has been floating to the sun.

We have been here before
We have been here before
We have been dead before
Inside your head

Love when will we be not wielding neon flashlights or is that the way it is?

Everyone has their own epic inside of them. Everyone has their own huge story to tell and for me this song is it. I recorded this in 2000 for an EP that I released on New Years Eve 2000. It was originally called Laugh In The Face Of Reality on the EP of the same name. It was me being as cryptic as I possibly could (at the time) and writing something as long and drawn out as I could (at the time). I wanted to record my epic and this is what came out. I put so many guitar leads in it, worked on the chord changes for countless hours, laboured over the drum tracks for days including recording the song with real drums and then writing a MIDI drum track cause the drums didn’t come out exactly perfect. I spent the better part of an entire day (22 hours) recording and re-recording the lyrics to get them right. I even spent some time figuring out the perfect melody and recording it to a dummy track that I could listen along to as I sang. I did the same thing to all the harmonies to make sure that I would sing them in key. This was definitely a labour of love for me and it is still my favorite song.

Lyrically the song kinda makes no sense. I think I wrote the lyrics in Jr. High. I am not sure, that whole time of eighth and ninth grade events seem to blur together in my head. A lot of my lyrics are conversationally based with me asking a lot of rhetorical questions. Sometimes they are questions directed at specific people but because of the nature of the medium, they turn into rhetorical questions. Anyway, “Love when will we meet not wielding neon flashlights” is me asking why we have to put on a facade to talk to someone. Why do we have to be somebody we are not in order to be interesting. Why do we have to use shiny “neon flashlights” to attract someone. Is that really the way it is? It’s a valid question that even today I still ask myself because I see it happen all around me. 1/2 of all marriages end in divorce, you know. A lot of people that don’t really know each other or at least they thought they did. Anyway, the second verse is where it starts losing it meaning. I was playing around with making a lyric that could mean several different things depending on the way you heard it which is why I wrote the lyric without punctuation. Consider it this way: Life, imagine a nation running wild and rampant? It would appear that I am asking “Life” a question. Consider it this way: Life’s imagination is running wild and rampant. It would seem that “Life” is getting out of hand now. I wanted to let the listener make whatever they wanted of the lyric. Perhaps even see it differently than the ways I just explained. The chorus is just more of the out-of-body remarks: Telling myself that I have been down this road before of imagining my own suicide (we have been dead before inside your head). The big question that echos throughout though (which I give more weight by making it the song title) is “will I sleep before I die?” Quite simply will I ever get rest from my weariness? Will I ever be at peace with myself? Will I let go of the things that hurt and frighten me so much? Will I be able to cope or will I succumb to suicide? It was these questions that I continually asked myself throughout a large portion of my life. Thankfully you all know the answer. Thank you for reading.