When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. - 1 Corinthians 13:11

***

I didn’t want to grow up, but I had to.

That’s the case with everyone, or at least everyone I know - we were all plunged, feet-first, into this sort-of pretend adulthood that trembled and glowed with artificiality.  We learned which drinks we liked and which drinks we were supposed to like, we learned how to balance checkbooks and how to tie down furniture while moving it across town.

But it wasn’t enough to make us adults; it made us pretenders.  We might’ve had suits and ties, but we didn’t look right in them.  For all of us, it took specific things to nudge us towards true, unbridled experience.

For our Narrator, what it takes is one winter night in an unfamiliar city with a woman who he thinks he knows.  Up to this point, he’s mimicked the steps beautifully; he’s paid for a hotel room, successfully navigated room service fees, and has managed to not turn into a total wreck in front of his companion.

But she either says or does something (what it is, it’s not clear, and not horribly important), and when she leaves to check the score of the previous night’s Braves game, he finds himself falling apart.

***

Oh, it was a four star night
At a two star hotel
And we toasted the new year
And prayed that hell wouldn’t swallow us whole

And you sketched me the outline
Of a complicated dream
And then left for the lobby
Looking for coffee and news on the home team

And I sat upright
In the bed and cried
And resolved to myself to turn into
A better man
By the time you got back

And you left your key on the dresser
So I sat still and listened for you
And I felt myself gasping and choking
It was morning and something was new

And I left CNN on the TV
And I picked up our plates and our trays
And I straightened the sheets and the pillows
And Ikneeled there and silently prayed

We ate breakfast and we said goodbye
And Phoenix shone like a dirty jewel
As I watched from my seat in the sky

***

I wrote this song last December. The minute details of a hotel room tryst ruined by sudden knowledge of impending adulthood sounded like something I wanted to explore, and I wanted it to be epistolic: a written remembrance of the exact moment our Narrator realized he was a child acting like a man, addressed to the woman who elbowed him into this particular crisis.

I explored and found myself enchanted by this idea.  Then, after approximately two weeks of obsession, promptly abandoned it.  You see, songwriters are fickle beasts.  We chase down our muses, wring them dry, and leave for something brighter, something louder, something new.

But what happens when songs fight their way back?  When they rise from the grave, hack their way through the underbrush of our haggard psyche, and present themselves as contenders?  Do we ignore them, or do we give in to them?  Does giving in to them make us weak, or does it simply mean that we are tuned into the heartbeat of what we create, of what we’ve forged from our footsteps?

Or does it simply mean that we’ve experienced wicked writer’s block, and that we’ve found ourselves deeply terrified, recently, that this “deep pool of songs” is drying up, that we’re losing touch with what makes us tick, that we are - gasp - out of ideas?

***

It might be a little bit of both.

***

(If, at one point during this recording, it sounds like Rachel and I are under attack by millions of tiny little paratroopers…

…it’s only because God brought the rain as we sat out on my back porch and recorded this song.)