Recovering the Sattelites (The album) | Recovering the Sattelites | Walkaways | Mercury Goodnight Elisabeth | Have You Seen Me Lately? | Miller's Angels | Daylight Fading Angels of the Silences | A Long December | Catapult Recovering the Sattelites (The album) I could tell you that the songs are about a guy doing this, but it's all me. I'm that guy. I think the "first album" is really about a lot of the shit I was going through and how difficult it was, about being unable to function within it. It was very frustrating and bitter, and it culminates with "Have You Seen Me Lately"--a howl which says "Not only do you not know me, but neither do I." It sums up the touring, fame, and everything, saying where it brought me to. The second half of the album is about a lot of the same feelings, but it's more cathartic, more about dealing with it. I find "Miller's Angels" to be about something that horrifies you and you're crying with it. It's not exactly chronological, but it's definitely moving from one place to another, in fit's and starts, one step forward and two steps back, that kind of thing. Um, well it still seems kinda weird to me. Just because the songs are very personal to me. But I didnt... they seem so singularly about me that I didn't think they would relate to other people. I didn't think other people would relate to them that well. I've sort of learned that thats not necessarily true. But it's still..... I just accept that it happens now, but it's sort of strange to me. Because they feel... I don't know.... when I write a song I just write it about myself. Generally. So. Then you know. They feel real personal. I don't.... I guess there are things that people have in common that make it meaningful for them as well I guess. I don't understand what that is. Recovering the Sattelites Back to the Top Recovering the sattelites has a sense of trying to resolve that question. I came to the realization that my life will always get shot up into the sky and then come crashing down. It's mostly about myself, but it's a very important statement about what we're doing. I wanted this, so I will take the other stuff. I don't have to like it, but it's my life, and I'm not going to throw it away. I write very few songs about other people, It's more about me. It's what I know. I defenatly think August and Everything After came to a place at the end of it [in the song "A Murder of One" where a guy says--addressing a woman in an abusive relationship--"Get out or your life will be a waste." He's also addressing himself, how he abuses himself in life. It says at the end, "Change." I think this album is an attempt to do that, while being overwhelmed by all things that are happening. Like the guy says in "A Long December": "And there's a reason to believe/ Maybe this year will be better than the last/ I can't remember the last thing you said as you were leavin'/ Now the days go by so fast." That's me in a nutshell--people leaving, me leaving, days going past. By the end of the song, what he says is "I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself/ To hold on to these moments as they pass." You have to remember to hold on to these moments. Life can be flashing moments that pass by you and add up to nothing, or they can be things that you keep and cherish. Loss doesn't mean gone forever: you have your memories. The things you lose don't have to be such ghosts as we always make them out to be. They can be memories that we can keep--especially me, since I get to write songs about them. Walkaways Back to the Top I wrote some lyrics and kept it real short. It's about a one night stand. It's about the girl saying to the guy, "I gotta go, I'm not gonna go to the next town with you." It's not the end of the world, Well that's how things usually go for me, maybe one day it'll be different, but not today. Mercury Back to the Top This is a song about a truly messed up chick. The kinda chick that is so messed up that she messes you up. It's either that or you were already so messed up to be even dealing with a chick like this. That's probably more likely the case. You know, like, when you're so just completely addicted to woman who is so.... bad. Like things got inside her and and bent and twisted and things inside her wrapped and twisted around the bent and twisted things... and then when you get near her, she reaches out and grabs you and bends and twists and it's so... fucked... up. But you're just so stuck with it... and you need it... really, really bad. And she says one thing and does another and she changes all the time because she's just like mercury." Goodnight Elisabeth Back to the Top One of the interviewers said to me yesterday "Ya, but how bad can it be...you can have any girl you want." OK, but what if the one girl you do want is at home studying for a Ph.D., and she can't come. She can't even come visit because on the weekends she interns at a clinic. What do you do. Life isn't about having any girl you want. That can seem great for a minute....and, I'm sure that if I was 21, that would be a lot better than it is now. Maybe that would be more fun. I don't know. I'm sure it would have been. The road gives a lot to you, and this whole business gives a lot to you, but it takes away too. I lost things that were really important to me...things that I thought would be with me my whole life. What do I have for myself from that period? I have a buncha money, and I have songs about periods of my life that are gone now. Like, I have "Goodnight Elisabeth". But Elisabeth just got married 2 weeks ago to somebody else. so, that's...that's gone..and that's gone because *I* was gone all the time. And not, like, doing anything wrong, not that I cheated on her ever, but it's gone. And, you know, that goes on...and, and...that's not heaven. The reason I said goodnight instead of good-bye is because I wanted it to be a lullaby... something she could remember it...us by. It’s a little sorded, that song, in places. Because I wanted to be honest about it too....I knew what I was going to do after I lost her. I knew that I would go out there and I would sleep with people. I would do anything to stop myself from thinking about her in the middle of the night.... where she was...with some other guy or something. It’s like it says: "I’ll wait for you in Baton Rouge, and I’ll miss you down in New Orleans, I’ll wait for you while that girl takes her clothes off, and I’ll wait for you while we’re having sex, and I’ll miss you while we’re having sex, but I’m still going to be doing that." That last verse is about that... the difference between me and her: You can wrap yourself in daffodils...me, the nut that I am, I’ll wrap myself in pain and mope about it all day long. But, you’re you and I’m the king of the rain. "We played here 10 years ago, we had our original record release party for AAEA here at bimbos back in 1993. How many of you were here? How many of you weren't born? I should tell you this story cause it has to do with this song. Because I had this friend "Betsy" and I had been begging her to go out with me for like a year and every time I saw her I'd say "come on", she'd say "no". And then we had this gig here that night and her friends were leaving and she decided to stay. We went up to her house in Berkeley. She had a big boulder behind her house we went and sat on the boulder all night long..anyways, it was very nice. (I was just remembering a really dumb joke she told me... ) It was like 2 in the morning, we were sitting on this enormous rock behind her house. and I said "Man this is so cool, I wanna rock". And she goes, "Adam, you do rock". So, anyways she ended up being my girlfriend, not because of jokes like that. And I thought my life had just completely come to fruit you know. We had a successful band, we signed a record contract, our record was coming out, we went out on tour, I had a great girlfriend. By Christmas..it was all gone. Being away on the road just screwed the whole thing up. And I came home at Christmas very bitter and wrote this song. I think it was the first song written for RTS. But I wrote it at Christmas..and its called Goodnight Elisabeth. Have You Seen Me Lately? Back to the Top I’ve felt that the thing that was supposed to.....supposed to flush me out, to make me feel the least like the ghost-type fella, was actually turning me into a ghost instead. I wanted to disappear everytime I heard myself on the radio. Not that I didn’t like hearing it, but after a while, you’re in a restaurant or in a bar somewhere, and it plays, and everyone looks at you, and it just creeped me out after a while. I felt that I couldn’t get into a place where people weren’t looking at me. I do feel that being a musician is about the life of a song. I think that the public, a lot of the time , have a tendency to color people in, who are famous. Make them their own image. Take what they believe a famous person should be, and what they’re like, and what they have, and how they’re life is, and color it into the person who may have nothing to do with that. That’s what the last verse of that song is about. It’s saying: "Having felt that I was so disappearing, why didn’t somebody tell me this was happening. I thought somebody would notice. I thought somebody would say something if I was disappearing...if I was missing". And then he sort of screams out: "can’t you see me?" And then he says: "OK, well then, color me in. If I’m everything you think I am... go on, color me in. And while you’re at it, make the sky green, make the... what is it...blue rain...make the rain blue, and make the sky black. If you can make me anything you want, go ahead and do that. Make the whole world anything you want. But, Give me your blue rain, give me your black sky...or just give me your green eyes... or your white skin. Something real. " Do you really know who I am? Everyone was saying they did. I’m not sure they did. You’re suddenly...you can become a very semi-private person who has trouble dealing with people, and the next day you belong to everyone. And, all I’m saying is that I’m not sure you get it, really. People come up to and they say "oh...we love you, we love you, can we take a picture with you?" Pictures make me uncomfortable. I can’t tell you why, but they do. And since they do, I probably shouldn’t do them. So, I’d say "I don’t really feel comfortable doing that." They say "ya, well, screw you...we *made* you." No you didn’t. The truth is, I was always me. I wasn’t nothing before this happened. I may not have been famous, I may not have been wealthy, but I was something. You don’t make somebody. You don’t. And, you can’t take it away either. That’s the thing people don’t realize. I appreciate what they’re saying.... they’re just saying that "we appreciate what you do." But, I couldn’t always take all that appreciation, sometimes. I just need a little space. (From Storytellers) : There was a period when we were touring on the last album where it, it all became kind of a bit much to me and I wrote this song in the year following that. I kinda hesitated to put it on the album because sometimes I think songs like this can be a little trite. It seems like everybody who has a big record writes a song about how hard a time they're having. I think it's a little hard to get people to sympathize with that sometimes because it's like, 'oh, he's famous, poor, poor shmuck.' But the truth is that it's a weird thing, you know. All of a sudden the whole world's different. People look at you differently, people treat you differently. If you woke up on Mars, you'd have trouble with the gravity too, for a little while. You adjust, I adjusted. But there is a period where I had a really hard time. One of the things that happens is that you have all these big things that happen to you in your life when this sort of things that happens to us happens. And you begin to pile up big experiences, but I think sometimes, you don't get to keep any of the little ones that are really important. Like in the song the person says, 'I remember all the little things that make up a memory, like she said she loved to watch me sleep, like she said, it's the breathing, it's the breathing in and out and in.' I realized that I wasn't really getting to keep any of the really little memories like that, and that it may be an angry songs in some forms, but it's also a really sad song about the small things in your life that you lose track of. And it's called "Have You Seen Me Lately?" Miller's Angels Back to the Top If I have a problem it’s that I think too much. The real meaning of this song is: what if there are angels, and what if they’re not benevolent. What if they’re, sort of, ambivalent. What if they, just sort of, hang there between you and God, and sometimes *block* the light of the Son (sun?) from getting to you...block the light of God. What if that’s what they do. Every once in a while, they just go....*PLUCK*....and they pull you off, just when it’s time, ‘cause it’s their job. What if it’s that hard of a world. And, what if you’re some guy who can’t stop thinking about it. I wrote it because my friend, Sean Penn, wanted us to write the closing theme for the crossing guard, and he brought the film in the middle of ‘94, this summer, to New York and showed it to Dan and I. That movie is about a guy who had an event happen in his life that changes everything in all these peoples lives...forever after that. That song is my....it’s not about the movie, but I took some of the feelings of that movie, and when Dan and I wrote the song, that’s what I was feeling. It’s like, what if it’s that kind of world? What if it just is? What if...because I think the problem the guy has in the movie is that he just can’t stop thinking about it. His whole life has been shattered by what happened, and it’s just never going to be put back together again....or, maybe it will some day, but it hasn’t happened yet. And, if I have a problem it’s that I think about things too much. Or, I think about things as much as I do. There’s no changing it, but I was thinking just what if you can’t stop thinking about these things hanging over your head. Daylight Fading Back to the Top At some point, it’s always going to happen...it’s a lifetime commitment. (Life’s) always going to go up, it’s always going to go down.... for me, at least. It may not be as extreme as it once was. There’s always going to be periods where I don’t write for a while, where I get sort of bitter. Maybe life will change and get better that way. But, you know, I wouldn’t...wouldn’t bet on it. It’s a one in a million thing to get what we got. Everybody that’s in our position wants....all of our friends at home, everybody wanted to be in a rock band. And, we have a lot of friends who are still playing music who are really good who haven’t had the success. We’re together, spending our lives playing music, unless we screw it up. I wouldn’t trade that for anything....any happiness... any peace of mind...there’s nothing in the world that I would trade for being able to do this with my life. Instead of having some wasted life like I thought I was going to have. At the same time, if you have difficulties coming into this sort of a situation, fame doesn’t necessarily fix them. It fixes some things, but it doesn’t fix any problems you might have with yourself. If you have problems dealing with people, all you have now is more people. Some of it actually exasturbates. It’s not a black and white thing, it’s a gray thing. There’s really parts of it I wouldn’t trade for the whole world, and parts of it I have trouble with, adjusting to those things. I’d really gone into hibernation and I didn’t know how to deal with the fact that the thing which was most important to me in my life was causing me the most pain and...um....fear that I’d ever been through. Fear....really, fear over what was happening. I was very scared dealing with all those people all of the time. Everywhere I went, I was really freaked out by that. Honestly, I can say “have you ever been scared of anything?” I was just scared. I didn’t dislike the people or anything, I just was....scared. And that was a weird thing to have...that the thing that you wanted the most in your life was causing you this sort of thing...this tape-loop you can get onto and it’ll drive you crazy. And I didn’t see any way out of it. Those songs are kind of about that...I just don’t know how to deal with this... I *didn’t* know how to deal with it. Now I just pretend its not happening. Because I’m not on the road yet. (In trance-like voice) I AM NOT HERE...I AM NOT HERE....THERE IS NO AUDIENCE HERE. Angels of the Silences Back to the Top (From Storytellers) : I write quite a few songs where the sort of issue is faith--having faith, keeping faith. And this song in particular is about the difficulty in having faith in things, and finding things to have faith in, in yourself, in God, in like he said, a woman. Faith is a weird thing, it in a sense it is all about waiting. It's not actually about getting anything, you know, faith is about the wait, because once you get something there is no need anymore. So a lot about faith is just the willingness to sort of throw yourself on a fence and hang there for a while. That's a very difficult and bitter thing, you know. In this song, I keep saying the main character, *I*, I said, "All my sins, I would pay for them if I could come back to you." It's not just about finding things to believe in, it's about wanting to be able to believe in anything too. And it's about all the voices that get inside your head and whisper for you to do it or not to do it as well. And it's called "Angels of the Silences." A Long December Back to the Top (From Storytellers): "In the middle of December of ‘95 my friend Jennifer got run over by a car, and just creamed; and I spent that whole month, while we were just beginning the record and most of Jan & Feb in the hospital, each like, morning and early afternoon then I'd go to the studio, the house where we were recording, and we'd play all afternoon and all night . It was a very weird time because ya know, there is a lot of stress ; not that it's a big deal being a second album, but any album. There just not that easy to make. It's a very stressful process, and especially when you're first starting out. And like I said, I spent a lot of time in the hospital which is pretty weird. But one day I just left the studio about 2 in the morning, and I went to my friend Samantha and Tracy's house which is Hillside Manor; and uh.. That's what we call it anyway, it's just a little house and I sat there talking with them, I woke ‘em up, got ‘em out of bed and made ‘em talk to me for a couple hours, then I went home to my house. "And I wrote this song between about 4 and 6 and then went to the hospital the next day, and came to the house and I played it for the guys before dinner and ... and taught it to them after dinner. And we played it about 6 or 7 times ..and .. do you remember which take number it was? Take number 6. We just stopped, that was it. We recorded the song, it was done. We all went in to the kitchen and had a cold beer, I grabbed Brad our engineer and ran back out about 5min later, had him play the tape three times, just recorded all the harmonies ...and uh..we've never touched it since, that was it. It's a completely live song except for the harmonies. "It's a song abo ut looking back on your life and seeing changes happening, and for once for me, looking forward and thinking... ya know...things are gonna change for the better ‘maybe this year will be better than the last' and uh... and so, like a lot of songs on the end of album it's not about everything turning out great, but it at least is about hope...and the possibilities ..." Catapult Back to the Top (From Storytellers) : I guess it has been pretty well documented by now that during the touring process of "August," you know, I kinda flipped out for a while and we had to take a little time off the road. I was thinking about this the other day, there's, if there's one thing that really kind of sort of sent me spinning to begin with it was, it was when Kurt Cobain died. It was a pretty hectic time for us, we, the record, the beginning of April '94 had been in the top five for a few weeks. We, we had just played the "Letterman" show and played "Round Here." We went on this European tour and in the middle of the European tour in Paris we were supposed to meet David Wilde and Mark Selliger and do an interview and photos for the cover of "Rolling Stone." And I, I was really unsure about doing this because it just seemed like everything's getting really huge as it is, and that's something I'm kind of nervous about and it is it really such a great idea to have ourselves on the cover of every magazine stand in America, you know? But we agreed to it, you know, and as it led up to that day when we arrived in Paris I got kind of more and more uptight and nervous about this. We landed in Paris and before we even had the chance to talk to any reporters or do any photographs, we, we found, we heard that, that he had shot himself. And it really scared the hell out of me because I thought, these things in my life are getting so out of control and I'm so wondering if it's possible to handle all these changes as they happen. And then we found out that he was dead and I thought well, you know, maybe these things aren't something you can handle, maybe this is something that is just too difficult to deal with. And here we are about to shoot this cover, you know. I think it really freaked me out because although fame can seem like something where you're surrounded by people all the time and it's really great and you're, you're always among friends and among people. The fact is that it can really wig you out and there can come a time when you feel like you're just completely and utterly alone. I thought that he must have just come to that point where he just was completely alone, and I really didn't want to get to that place myself. And about a year later when I was writing this song, it began as a song about, like so many other songs I wrote in this period of time, about just wanting to push everything back and frustratingly wanting to just make everything just stop. And I thought of him because I thought it's not, it's a horrible thing to have to come to that place and feels so alone because you wish you didn't have to, and you don't really want to. But, you find yourself there anyways. And it' s called "Catapult."