Twice the Usual - Songwriting Journal
by Thom Barker
GO TO Technical Journal
by Ken Barker
In the summer of 1996, I was out at Jim Albert's cabin in Québec for a long weekend. My friends Paul and Laura and I went out for a paddle in Paul's canoe. The passage of the boat through the water felt a little sluggish and I commented on it. Paul came back with: "Well, you're twice the usual amount of baggage we normally carry."
Twice the Usual instantly became the working title for a new collection of songs I had started writing while my last CD, The Forest for the Trees, 1995, was in production.
I half expected the title would change by the time we got around to producing the new album, but as my personal baggage continued to increase over the years, Twice the Usual became all the more appropriate.
During and since we recorded my acoustic guitar and vocal parts for this album in 2002, through much internal strife, a self-imposed three-and-a-half years of solitude and a complete overhaul of my emotional, spiritual and professional well-being, I have finally managed to slough off all that old baggage.
This collection of songs, a.k.a. 2x, as my brother Ken likes to abbreviate it, now serves as a poignant cautionary tale.
Track 1: Even After All This Time
In the fall of 2001, I was driving back from Houston to Austin. I had been living in Texas for three years, but still marvelled at how different the sky looked after having spent most of my life in Canada. I stopped at a roadside pullout to take in the familiar constellations tilted in their southern way above the scrubby chaparral landscape.
As I contemplated the universe, my thoughts turned to a long-term, long-distance relationship that I still viewed as current although we hadn't seen each other and had barely even talked in more than a year. We never really broke up, per se, but on that lonely stretch of road I started coming to terms with the fact that it was ending nonetheless.
Most of the lyrics came together by the time I could see the glow of Austin on the horizon. As soon as I got home, I pulled out my guitar. The music came just as easily because the mood was so sweetly melancholic.
She remained the love of my life until I met my present wife and it is still the only failed relationship I can look back on in only positive terms.
Track 2: We Cherish Our Scars
Perhaps the best line I've ever come up with.
The first time I ever felt vulnerable in the world was an incident that happened when I could not have been more than four years old. An older boy threatened me while I was playing in the park at Deshaye Elementary School across the street from our house on Cameron Crescent in Regina, Saskatchewan. He was wearing a ring that he said shot lightning bolts and he would use it on me. I ran back to the house where my mom gave me an elastic band to wear on my finger that would deflect the lightning bolt back at him. I went back to the park and told him about my defence against his potential lightning attack and he punched me in the face.
Life is a collection of victories and defeats. For me, the good and the bad can be equally compelling. I was told several years before I wrote this song, during a particularly devastating break-up, there was a sadness in me she just couldn't abide any more. For a long time, I thought it was something that needed fixing, but after grappling with it extensively, I realized it is a part of me I really like and a significant part of who I am.
I don't know how universal the feeling is, but I suspect I am far from alone in cherishing my scars.
Track 3: It Goes On
As long as I've been self-aware, I have struggled with the impossibility of my own existence. Most of the time, it's simply a nagging doubt easily set aside in the busy activities of daily life. However, there have been times when it has become an almost frantic, paralyzing obsession.
The worst of these periods was a 1996 episode in Boston, Massachusetts. I was quite sick, but even worse, I couldn't get it out of my head that the existence of anything, much less sentient thought, is simply not possible. I spent three days in a hotel room. I did not move from the bed. It was so overwhelming I started trying to will myself out of existence.
When it was time to go home and I still existed, I got up and started writing this song. It would sit on the shelf, however, until the next episode hit me on Christmas Eve 1998. I had popped by a favourite pub where watching the patrons and bartender, I developed a longing for female companionship. That was not to be. Later, in my empty Austin apartment, I was quite enjoying cultivating a lovely, bittersweet melancholy and a hangover for Christmas morning. It was, I think, the first time in my 35 years I was alone Christmas Eve. Then I crashed into that manic spiral of existential doubt.
I woke up Christmas morning and finished the song before going to the airport in Dallas to pick up my sons.
Track 4: Life is a Circle
In the summer of 1997, I packed up my little Ford Escort station wagon with all my earthly possessions -- save a few boxes of memorabilia I left at my parents' house -- and my sons Bryen and Patrick and we headed south.
I had no idea where I would end up or what I would do when I got there, but I knew Ottawa wasn't working for me. The lyrics for this song started to gel as we made our way across Tennessee. I finished it that same night in a campground in Louisiana while my boys slept.
I never really thought of myself as an unhappy person, but I was definitely chasing something that would turn out to be unattainable until I straightened out my own twisted psyche. The idea that life was roughly circular, but irregularly so, even as I was just setting out on what would end up being a six-year adventure, was perhaps my very first inkling that there is no such thing as a geographic cure for what ails you. No matter where you are or what you do, there can be no peace as long as it is the same old you who is there and doing it. That is a song for the next CD, however.
Track 5: Body of Mine
In the fall of 1996, it had started to sink in that one relationship was truly over and the new one might be a dead end. I was living in the Glebe, in downtown Ottawa, and working for Nortel (then Bell Northern Research) way out in the west end of Nepean. The long bike commute every morning and evening provided ample fodder for lyrics writing.
It was a moody time for me and I tossed a lot of lyrics around, bits and pieces that never really gelled into a fully formed composition. It finally all came together on a trip to New York City to visit my distant and mostly absent love.
There was no going back and, at times, I felt like there was no going forward and I just couldn't fathom being happily single because so much of my identity and self-esteem was wrapped up in other people.
Fortuitously, Ferron happened to have a show at New York University, which I went to, alone. The final pieces of the puzzle fell into place. I got the majority of the song together in a hotel room in Newark, New Jersey and polished it up when I got back to Ottawa.
Track 6: Don't Try
Some people are pleasers, bound by a sense of duty to make everybody around them happy, thus sacrificing themselves in the process. The pursuit of perfection in the eyes of a disparate circle of friends, family, employers, employees, clients etc. must be a very daunting prospect. I was looking for a metaphor, ostensibly to help a friend/lover, but ultimately self-serving. I imagined Jesus, the man, and the enormous pressure he must have been under in his latter days. I thought about what advice deposed gods might have for him. I thought about how he might translate that to his hopes for his disciples' futures. I thought about how he might have viewed the predicament Pilate faced in sentencing him. The chorus just flowed naturally from those musings. It seems somewhat incongruent with at least what we're taught about Jesus' actions and philosophy, but I imagine his actual life was much more complicated and subject to internal conflict as all of our lives are in trying to balance duty and commitment with happiness and personal fulfillment.
Interestingly, I wrote this song as an exercise for a songwriting group in Ottawa. The group was really critical of it. Some didn't like the way it doesn't deviate from its basic pattern. One guy said it needed a bridge. Others were offended by the license I took with the Jesus story. One woman didn't get the use of terms like preacher, colleagues and lawyer. I was pretty headstrong in those days and dismissed all the criticism. Good thing too, because the general listening public has been much more accepting of the tune.
Track 7: The Quiet in Us
Life is full of highs and lows, but moments of perfect bliss are rare. One such moment for me was a weekend in Northern California in 1996. We were so perfectly in love, the outside world was non-existent for three glorious days. We danced naked on the beach in Santa Cruz, drove with the top down through the wine country and strolled among redwoods. We made love everywhere and simply got lost in each other. The 'quiet' is our innate capacity to live in the moment, consummately happy and content. It exists in us always although it is not always present and it rarely presents itself when we're striving for it.
Sometimes when I play this song, it can conjure up that blissful state.
Track 8: What Will You Do?
When you're with someone for a significant period of time, you inevitably end up going through all the stages of grief, no matter how badly it ends. This song represented my acceptance that both of us had moved on. I couldn't help wondering, though, where her life would take her and whether she would also look back fondly on all the positive aspects of our relationship.
Reviewers have sometimes called my music bittersweet. So be it. Isn't life?
Track 9: No Forever
This song is the antithesis of What Will You Do. Anger can be a self-defeating emotion if you can't get over it. If you can, it can be highly instructive. In pouring out my anger toward a recently ex-girlfriend, I took the first steps toward reversing a pattern of behaviour that wasn't conducive to lasting relationships. I had a tendency to jump into things head first without considering all the implications. Add to that an ill-developed sense of self coupled with an intransigence to recognize my own culpability and I had a sure-fire recipe for ending up single. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the next time, or even the time after I would stop and remind myself there's no forever in some people's we. It took me three more kicks at the cat and the realization that 'some people' might include me.
Track 10: Not a Setting Sun
Louis Fagan was one of the best friends I ever had and an extremely talented poet, lyricist and musician. When he died of a heroin overdose in 1997 after having ostensibly kicked the addiction, I was angry. What a waste. Adding to my emotional anguish was the fact I was in New York City at the time and incommunicado. Although several people tried desperately to get hold of me, by the time I got back, the funeral was over and for a long time I felt like I had no closure, especially since nobody ever shared the results of the autopsy with me.
Writing Not a Setting Sun was an exercise in catharsis. I had to get my anger and sadness out. I still intend to write a song celebrating Louis' short life and the wonderful music he created.
Track 11: Say Goodnight
Temptation is a harsh master who carries a double-edged sword. He came to me hard in the fall of 1995. I was traveling a lot to Texas and California. My then-partner was traveling a lot to Asia and Africa. I was lonely, but it wasn't just the physical separation, we were also growing apart emotionally. Just to make things more complicated, I started falling for another woman. The longing was both titillating and tortuous. The opportunity first presented itself in San Francisco, but I managed to avert temptation and say goodnight. I sat in my hotel room in Santa Clara for a while strumming my guitar. The plodding progression that would become the foundation for the song perfectly reflected my dark mood. I really did cry myself to sleep conflicted by longing, guilt, obsession, love, frustration and confusion. The next morning I was overcome by emotional numbness and wrote the chorus.
When we did Say Goodnight as a band, the crunchy distortion of the electric guitar gave the song an even more tortuous feel, which I like. I almost still like it better just me and acoustic guitar, though, because it's so much sadder that way.