You might have totally devastated someone in a break up, but you don't know what it feels like until it happens to you. Or vice versa, you might feel heartbroken and indignant, but you don't know how hard it is to NOT hurt someone until you have to initiate the breaking up. For any of you who are dating and who've yet to experience both sides, rest assured, you probably will. It's called relationship karma.

Case in point: A relationship I'd been in was ending after 8 1/2 years and I needed a distraction. The both of us had been flying all over the country and it just seemed like neither of us wanted to come down to earth and face the fact that our relationship was ending.

[Begin Digression]

To prolong this denial I decided to devote myself to a cause. (Try it! Feels good.) I chose Election Reform. It was almost the 2004 presidential election. I found a nonpartisan election reform group in Florida and one of the members invited me to come join them and live with his family until the election. Mission "Denial" accomplished: I was off on a new, all-encompassing adventure. There would hardly be time to think about my woes.

Yet there was time. At the end of most days I would retreat to the guest bedroom and feel sorry for myself. My soon to be ex had done some uncool things and I was pretty upset about it. I wrote the first version of "Point of No Return" there in Florida, days before the 2004 election.

Having no friends in Florida when Halloween came, I looked up the only indie rock bar I could find in all of Miami. Having no time to prepare, I showed up without a costume, and was shunned by the hipsters. So I went into the bathroom and spent a half hour completely covering myself in toilet paper. I was now a mummy. People started talking to me at this point, and I made a lifelong friend at the bar that night (shout out to Reishma!) and then started dancing to the punk rock band.

I jumped onstage at one point and the singer leapt into my arms. He was dressed in a wedding gown with combat boots and probably weighed almost 200 pounds. I felt my back twinge and returned to my seat to pound some more liquor and try not to feel the back spasms. When I returned to my host family's house I was locked out. I laid down in their backyard hammock instead of waking them, savoring my back spasms until morning.

As you know, Kerry lost the election. A fan in Ohio later told me that two election workers there were each sentenced to 18 months in prison for rigging the recount of the 2004 election. There are lots of other allegations (here are some) but they mostly come from left-wing sources, so I may just be passing on sore loser spin, it's hard to say. The things I learned with the election reform group awakened me to the fact that EVERY election has had serious irregularities and dirty secrets, from both sides of the aisle.

[End digression.]

As the years passed, I would occasionally work on this song. It was shaping up to be sort of a musically elaborate alt-country song. Here's an excerpt of the first every rehearsal of Point of No Return. It's wildly different than the album version. When I started recording it at Slaughterhouse Studio with Sturgis on drums, we must've tried about 20 takes and none of them seemed good enough. Sturgis was getting frustrated with how often the song started and stopped, interrupting the feel, and I couldn't find a solution I liked. I gave up on the song.

A few months before my mastering session (once you schedule the mastering session there's a real deadline) I bought an electric guitar. I was jamming with Dan Thiel and started playing the opening riff. On a whim, I tried singing the Point of No Return lyrics. The time signature was different, everything was different. I liked that. I've always been fond of bad ass guitar riffs with wimpy singing, mostly because the macho singing that usually accompanies guitar rock feels cartoonish to me (cookie monster rock.) I got excited about the rewrite possibilities and threw together the new version. I had to record it and mix it myself, there was no time or money left to go to a studio. My limitations really show on this track compared to many of the others - it's just a lot rougher sonically and and not as perfected. But Dan Thiel nailed the drumming and Joe Bennett happened to be visiting the U.S. right when I was doing takes so he joined us and played the bass part.

[Plug]
Joe Bennett (from the UK band Goldrush) has an amazing music festival in the UK and he's starting an American counterpart: Truck Music Festival in America. April 30 - May 2. I'm playing! See you there.
[End Plug. Return to "relationship karma" theme.]

As I was finishing this song, and finishing the whole album, I was again caught up in another disintegrating relationship. I was so focused on finishing the album I couldn't be bothered with addressing what was going on and dealing with it. Only this time, I had done some uncool things and she was really hurt. The irony was not lost on me. I was finishing a song with complaints about my own heartbreak and mistreatment at the very moment that I was behaving badly and being the cause of a similar sort of pain that I had experienced four years earlier. The lyrics of the song started to change meaning for me, and now the song had elements of self-accusation, especially the line "you were the one I felt safe with."

When you've hurt people, the least you can do, as you try to make sense of it later on, is fess up to your flaws and mistakes and try not to make excuses. I try not to be the sort of person where everything that happens is always someone else's fault. Sure, breaking up hurts, that's pretty much unavoidable, but in my past complaints when my heart had been broken, it was always a central premise to my indignation that I would never treat someone the way I had been treated. May you all be more grounded and self-aware than I am, so you never have to learn by hurting others. I feel pretty chastened now, with the knowledge that there was a time when I betrayed the trust I had earned.

I no longer feel indignant about my own past heartbreak. Because I wasn't able to do any better when the roles were reversed. When things go past a certain point, there's not much left to save. Letting it get to that point is always partly your fault. I can't even articulate what I've learned from all of this. All I know is that I want to be braver about addressing things right away when they come up, I want to be more in touch with my feelings and not surprised by them as they bubble up out of repression, and I want to try to deal with them, and keep things from getting to that point of no return.

And I never want to write a whiny "you hurt me" song again. I'm done. It's all comedy from here on out. ;)

Feb 2, 2010