The breakup. The rebound. It's so predictable, and pathetic, right? But you gotta go through it to get to the other side, especially after real heartbreak. You have to relearn everything. The awful thing is, at least in my case, when I'm on the rebound I am unable to really become vulnerable, and I can't even really tell how I feel about anything, and I don't like to be alone, so I want company, but it's pretty unfair for the other person.

This song is all about that period for me, the period when I started dating again, but was still "getting my nerve back."

“What do you get out of it?” he was asking. A silence ensued, how does one answer that? Her head swirled with things to say. Answers, feelings of outrage, ‘how dare he’s’ flickering over the brilliant sky of answers. At that moment she vowed to just get him into bed, have fun and, well she may or may not see him again. At least she may never see him like that, smiling, beautiful, wonderful, naked lying in her bed. She was prepared to savor this moment. He had been special and she hadn’t even had time to figure out why.

Now here they were sitting at her house and she still wasn’t sure how to act. She just wanted to feel wonderful and sexy, to be desired, and he wanted to talk. How often does this happen to other girls she thought? Isn’t it usually the girls who won’t go to bed with a boy until they’ve talked? Why isn’t he just thrilled to have found a girl who didn’t make him jump through hoops? The night was beautiful again, and he was consumed by his past. “I can’t handle the idea of a girlfriend.”

She had let him into her house because she trusted him. For some reason she trusted him. They had known each other for six years now. They weren’t close, they never were. They had lived lives, lost loves, lived on opposite coasts and somehow ended up living four blocks apart. They had somehow found each other again and this seemed a bit like a movie to her, and that made her sit up and take note. She was happy for the first time in a long while, maybe even a bit smitten. He had told her he was damaged goods, she knew that. She was damaged goods. Anyone who had lived their life with any real emotion was damaged goods. The idea was that he made her forget that, and she wanted to do the same for him. She had told him that it was ok, she would be there for a hug if he needed it. A warm body next to his on cold hard nights, and instead of softening him he asked ‘what do you get out of it’? Kindness is always met with suspicion.

Everyone is worth something and he simply didn’t realize what he was worth. He didn’t know how special he could be, nor did he realize that she was giving something of herself that she never gave away. That he had something that she had never seen before and she was willing to give something to see what it was, for good or bad, she would be willing to gamble on a smile. He had made her smile, he had no idea what that was worth.

--excerpt from "For Her"
by Stephanie Washburn,
(co-writer of Ashes and Stains)

I met Stephanie years ago when I was playing with three against four and we were at a college booking conference. It was ridiculous that we were there, because the conference was for entertainment that would reach as broad an audience as possible. There weren't many musicians. Jugglers, albino python handlers, giant velcro suits, sumo wrestler puffy suits, stand-up comedians, sure, but not rock bands. Stephanie was repping her school, and we all got bored and ended up playing hide and seek at this enormous resort we were at. I hid in the rafters because people never look up.

As Stephanie and I worked together on the song lyrics, some lyrics had to get cut, of course. This one was pretty amusing in retrospect:

They jump a bridge of lovers like a desperate flea
What they call love looks like a crutch to me

I mean, being forced to imagine fleas is pretty distracting. And then the unrelated metaphors - it's a flea! It's a crutch! It's a flea, with crutches! Had to go.

The song was originally called Olmstead and Vaux (designers of Prospect Park), then Getting My Nerve Back.

Sturgis did a great job of imitating the fake drum sounds of my early demo with his real drumset. Anand and I both played electric guitar and bass on different parts of the song. I recorded and mixed the song at Slaughterhouse, and then later didn't like it. The change from the verse to the 3/4 time in the chorus was really sudden and weird (still is, a little, but it's way better than it used to be) and the first verse was so short that the time change seemed even more sudden. The song started driving me crazy and I went back to the studio several times to try little changes to see if it would improve it for me. Nate Van Til was with us one session and in the midst of a poem-a-day project, so our recording efforts ended up as the topic of an amazing poem he wrote.

 

The Studio

knees up on cow pillows
I zonk while they tweak
dog roll off the couch to kibitz

creamy distortion
isn't as personal—
Chasing The Demo:
punch in the acoustic

the snare hit's a beep
heralding drama
we edited out

'busted' or 'battered'
change out of these CLOTHES
change out OF these clothes
track increment
and vox comp
it's breathy, but it's supported

If you open a box of mints
it's always full of guitar picks

plink and chime
fret cleaner and slide
Distortion III

how we make electricity sing for us tonight

 

Isn't that a GOOD poem? Good poems are hard to find. You won't find them in the New Yorker, anyway, that's how I feel.

So about a month before mastering the whole album, with almost all the songs done, I freaked out and decided that the song wasn't working and needed a fresh approach. I'd been practicing with my band for the CD release party and we had tried a version of the song that was RADICALLY different. I then spent the next three weeks editing drum takes and getting James to do keyboard overdubs and scrambling to get this new version mixed. Would you like to hear it?

Radically different alternate version of Ashes and Stains.

It wasn't until after the mastering session that I realized that the original version was better, that this new version was trying too hard, and that it sounded too much like a Bloc Party song I had been listening to a lot. There were some other things I was unhappy with anyway, so I had to schedule a whole second mastering session, which made me miss my deadline, and I showed up in April at my CD release party with no CDs. But the song got its moment when, months later, NPR featured it.

-Nov. 2, 2009