Listen to 'You Can Stay, But No Suki Suki'

They say that every story needs a conflict to be interesting; maybe that's why I write more songs about break ups than I do about falling in love. This song is about a break up that took several times before it stuck. We'd break up, we'd get back together, we'd break up again. It's about when your mind says no but your body keeps saying yes, and your body keeps showing a surprising ability to trick your mind into putting yourself into situations that you have pledged to avoid.

I remember what a beautiful spring it was in Brooklyn. I had found a skateboard on the sidewalk during a trash day in Park Slope, and she lived downhill from me, so I would jump on my skateboard at the end of the night and cruise the wrong way down one-way streets and be at her house within minutes of her phone call. Her phone calls were brief. An introductory hello, a quick story about her day at the office, usually about some annoyance but ending in laughter, and then a pause, and a flirtatious plea:

"come ovah."

How could I resist?

Yet once I realized she was ready to settle down and I wasn't, I knew I had to break up with her. But I didn't really WANT to. Things were lovely. We were good together. But I knew I was wasting her time, because she was looking for a life partner, and I just wasn't on that wavelength. Also, as I got to know her better, I started to feel like I had an inkling of the kind of life she wanted for herself, and it wasn't the kind of life I was interested in. "Why are people so ambitious?" she said once. "What's so bad about good food and good people?"

The first time we broke up it was more about taking some time apart, it didn't have a feeling of finality to it. We'd still talk on the phone. Then she would say, "come ovah" and I would say, that's probably not a good idea, or, that's not what we agreed, or, let's wait at least a week. And she would say, "I know... you really shouldn't." And then there would be a long pause and neither of us would say anything, and then she'd just say "so come ovah." And then I'd be on my skateboard and at her apartment in a matter of minutes.

But even then it was often a disappointment, because we were both mad at ourselves for relapsing. Sometimes we would just argue and cry, even though we were expecting to break the rules and make love instead. Other times, for a couple weeks, things would seem like maybe we were fine and we weren't going to break up after all. I would apologize for being ambivalent, and we would settle into our old routine and then I would hear that voice in my head "stop wasting her time."

The point when it got most ridiculous was when she was inviting me over, and I was declining, or maybe I was trying to convince her to let me come over, and she was skeptical - it was always back and forth like that, but once she said "alright, you can stay, but no suki suki." (suki suki was her cutesy term for lovemaking. I don't know where she got that term - the internet says suki means "to like" in Japanese and that Cartman on South Park will say sucky sucky when he's pretending to be a Vietnamese prostitute, but I don't know where she picked up the phrase.)

Well, we were actually good to our word. After hanging out for the evening, we went to bed in her little double, facing opposite directions, not touching. We woke up abruptly in the middle of the night entwined around each other and getting it on. At that point it became clear that we really had to stop kidding ourselves and set some real limits.

She's getting married now. Although we were pretty clumsy at breaking up, we clearly did the right thing.

This song began when I was working on musical ideas with my friend Steve Klems. He wrote a guitar part and I wrote a syncopated bass line that went with it nicely. I hardly ever saw him again after that - but I kept working on the song. I worked out a depressed and anxious little number called Newspapers and Gasoline back when we were invading Iraq a second time. There were 'No Blood For Oil' signs popping up (again) and the mood in Berkeley, CA (where I was living) felt dark and full of foreboding as the American military started to throw its power around and the country got jingoistic.

Something is happening
The ground beneath your feet wakes you
and shakes you out onto the street
Lost in the crowd
The disappointed faces all staring at the sun
wondering will the sky collapse today

Tension in the air
Press the button
Sweet little myth, pour us all a cocktail and tell us it's okay
and that nothing will collapse today

Oh, how I need your precious arms around me
To take my mind away
from the newspapers and gasoline

The song got shelved for several years, and then when I returned to it I just wasn't obsessing about the state of the world as much and I wasn't sure anyway that writing songs about global doom and gloom was really all that interesting anyway. My love life, however, was full of drama and I needed to express some of those feelings so I rewrote the song, keeping only the line "oh, how I need your precious arms around me."

As I started planning to record a new album, I thought I should get some musicians in a room and try out some of the material. I talked to some musicians I knew that I thought were pretty talented, but they all needed to get paid. Alright, I'll pay them all to rehearse a couple songs, I decided. This was one of the songs we worked on, but I didn't have a very clear vision for it yet, and I just wanted to try out some things. The musicians were more used to learning material, rather than trying things that didn't work and experimenting, it seemed to me, and the whole experience left me feeling awful. I couldn't get a good vibe going, and I was out several hundred dollars with nothing accomplished except for new amounts of self doubt. The only moment in the whole rehearsal that sounded good at all was the opening part to this song. I took that home, loaded it into my computer, and edited out the rest, and started working using music programs to do it myself. The result was this juxtaposition of real and fake: the intro was warm sounding, in a real room, played by real people - the verses were cold and had a mechanical beat, the bridge had computery voices. That theme of human vs machine emerged and served the underlying struggle of the song - trying to keep your emotional distance but being overcome by desire, losing yourself in someone's "precious arms."

I ended up keeping some of the computer composed parts but re-recording the human parts at the Slaughterhouse, although I did get Sturgis to play drumset in a way that tried to sound like a drum machine. He did an amazing job, but then you've got to ask yourself, why not just use the drum machine? I can't really answer that, I guess I was just in love with the idea of having real drums that sounded like fake drums. Anand added all this glorious moody guitar atmosphere to the track. He was sleep deprived as he was squeeing in sessions right after his son had been born, and he hardly remembers the sessions at all. It felt to me like there was this unconcscious or primal part of him playing the guitar, which also served the theme.

Eventually in the process I started getting frustrated again and I couldn't find a mix of the song that affected me, so I was considering ditching the song. Anand came over and tried his hand at mixing one night and started stripping away layers until there were these very exposed moments, which totally saved the song and created the intimacy I was searching for. Once he got locked into a vision for how it should sound, the rest of us stepped back and gave him room, recognizing that he had found inspiration.

June 2, 2010

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