Erotic

I brought this song to Soft Sound Studio in the early nineties, and FoJammi and I worked on it for a couple of weeks to get it as finished as it is now. Since we couldn't track guitar and vocals at different times, FoJammi and I made several short samples of the guitar line and synched them with midi to the rest of the synth tracks. This freed me up to sing this with all my heart, putting a great deal of effort and thought into the actual performance of the vocals, instead of doing whatever I could to deliver both at once.

I've loved to sing since I was a kid. My family was a singing family, one that sang when we got together for birthdays and picnics and whenever my grandma got out her little plastic ukulele. But when I heard my voice going through FoJammi's nice studio microphones and through his banks of reverb and EQ effects and compression and whatever else he had going I fell in love with my own voice for the first time. And this song was one of my best vocal performances of this time, perhaps the one that convinced me that I really could sing, if I pitched my voice right and worked hard enough at it.

The problem with this song that I can't sing as well as I would like. When you can hear yourself going off pitch it's really gut wrenching, something tolerable, even enjoyable, in an artist you respect, becomes intolerable when you do it yourself.

I gave a great deal of thought to Erotic. First, I wrote it with all minor chords, as an experiment. Then, the words, which are about my post-pubescent relationship with eroticism, forced me to become allusive and vague instead of painfully obvious, as my lyrics almost always are.

Right after we recorded this version of this song, which is probably the final version, I wanted to redo it. The guitar solo was good, but had a couple of glitches that I can't hear any more. And many years later, I wanted to rewrite some the lyrics to reduce the unconscious assumptions of male privilege I now heard. But I've resigned myself to leaving it as it is, since experiments with resurrecting the ancient midi files have been nothing but a lot of hard work for very little good.

Plus, I'm unwilling to sacrifice the incredibly beautiful keyboard work FoJammi did on this song. The keys come in on the second verse, with pleasant counterpoint and harmonies, and then soar on the French Horn arrangements. I'm sure he could do it again, but is it worth the time, when this version is so good already? Better to live with the flaws.

Let’s get one thing straight—I never use imagery.
I’m not that kind of boy; I believe in honesty.
It’s an image with weight; it makes you circumvent
Circle around all the things that you might have meant.

And it doesn’t hurt anyone
And it isn’t real dangerous
And when you want it bad enough
You can even think it up on your own.

It’s just a little vice, and it shouldn’t shock anyone.
Between you and me, it’s acts of unlimited love.
It’s a fever that builds—it comes and it goes, you know.
You’ve got to admit that it’s all in our minds by now.

And if you try to examine it
And you take all the measurements
and read in between the lines
You’ll find out that you’re missing the point.

You shouldn’t ever judge an act of creation.
The myths that inflame our highly volatile brains.
The mystery of the act of attraction proves
you can never disprove what happens in solitude.

I don’t care about morals
I don’t care about prudity
But here is the way it is
Resplendent in nudity:
I want you to use your brains,
Now what do you think about that?

Download Erotic.