Back to Back Again

The older I get, the easier it is to understand why age is even more important than sex, when it comes to mutual compatibility. There's a certain comfort that, as one slips comfy into the melancholic nighty-night of a lifetime's dotage and dose dere dithering days, that the older one gets the younger the other one gets, until what once seemed old seems gravid, whiskey and stubble-scrubbing young and always with more than a teeny dash of ambergris and anise.

But so much for me, dumpling gums! So much for everything I once stood for, when back I stood with all the ding-dong Daves and Stanlies in yesterday's quiver. Because when sparkling's the rave then gumbo's the mumbo, and jumbo sized is any fries that blows through the drive-by scatterflies of any hipster's passing chance. Hoopties linger in driveways idling mad with the rich thick smoke of leaded gas sweet and insistent on the evening breeze.

In other words, an immature take on gender and love relations, adolescent male categorically and explicitly. "Back to Back Again" is one of the first songs I ever wrote, and it has always had many different parts, which I like as a condition or perhaps more generally an ambition of Change Music is that it change, and change drastically, as much as concievable in any given song.

The opening chords were created specifically to demonstrate how good I was on the guitar to David Udell, who never took any real notice of the song, as far as I remember. So this effort of mine that I expended simply to impress David Udell was basically pointless, since nobody knew it but me, and me mostly in retrospect.

The lyrics were a simple reflection of my own fears of abandonment, and the wistful longing for a sexual prime that has passed. I used to think a lot about how the frequency and hotness of sex would diminish between partners and the range of reactions to this eternal decline between every single partner known to man, excluding liars and braggarts, of course.

This was a song I used to like to play acoustically with Slash Brannon in the pre-Jambox innocence of a couple of stoned kids messing around with some chords and violin. The essential nature and sound of the song is pretty unchanged, but the get down parts have gotten more latin and swinging and better. It's interesting to me as a songwriter to reflect on all the changes in this song I've made over years of playing it, all the stuff left in and left out.

I wonder what all my songs would sound like if someone else sung them, but this was might really be fun.

Download "Back to Back Again"