HanginAround | I wish I was a Girl | Four Days | Amy Hit the Atmosphere St. Robinson.. | High Life | Mrs. Potters Lullaby | Mrs. Potters Lullaby, Colorblind, 4 Days, Kid things Connection. | Speedway Hanginaround Involves Duritz's memories of his mid-20s, when, he said, he was stoned all the time and unsure about his future. "[It's about] thinking I had no future, and wondering what the hell was going to happen," Duritz said. "So I was sort of ... semicelebratory about that but also [ thinking] 'Where am I going?' It's about a wild time when I was growing' up. Living a bit of a wild life, celebrating that. It's also about being scared that you don't have a future, but I don't think that's a waste. In the end, the guy just decides to continue having fun and to worry about it later. " I wish I was a girl Back to the Top "I Wish I Was a Girl" as a sequel to a Recovering the Satellites song, "Goodnight Elisabeth," about a former love. Duritz said he spoke to a friend of Elisabeth's at a wedding recently. The women claimed to be the person on whose shoulder Elisabeth cried when she thought Duritz was out on the road being unfaithful. "[It's] something that I didn't ever do," Duritz said, "but she was kind of crushed by that thought when we were going out. That song is about how 'I wish I was a girl so you would believe me.' If I was your friend you'd probably actually believe me when I tell you this." Four Days Back to the Top Four days - This is a song called "Four Days" which I wrote uhh I met this girl and the day after I met her she left to fly home to ohio to visit her family and I hadent heard from her in four days and on the fourth night I was sitting out in the studio and I was going compleetly stircrazy and I went in and wrote this song in the middle of the night and pretty much recorded it at about 4 oclock in the morning..I made everybody stay late to record the song..so uhm this is for a girl from Ohio..its called Four days. Amy Hit the Atmosphere Back to the Top tells the tale of a young girl who managed to bail out before she crashed and burned. "It's about a creative group I knew of writers and painters. The whole group became junkies.. They all slipped into the heroin culture There was this one really young girl named Amy, she was about 18. She got sucked right down there, but she managed to get out. A sweet kid, she moved back to Wyoming. And cleaned herself up. Went back to being a ballerina, went back to college. That's what that song is about." St. Robinson.. Back to the Top Thats the one song we had written before we started the album, its the only one, although it was drasticly diffrent before. It's of a different depth lyricly cause its really about someone, It's sort of me taking the piss out of myself in a way. It's about a guy with big dreams, which is you know, been what I've always been. But it's about a guy whos so obsessed with his big dreams and like everything he wants out of life, but he cant relate to life on simplier terms, all he can think of is in terms of his big dreams, and it makes it so he can't deal with day to day communication with people, specificly this one person. It's a song about how at some point this guy is looking back at him life and hes seeing a point where two peoples lives spun together and then for what ever reason they spun apart.. High Life Back to the Top - The song is sort of a 'state of the singer' address. Both "High Life" and "Mrs. Potter" are larger than life songs about me, I think. In "High Life", I was writing about a life I had really come to love for a while in L.A., but that was also kind of wiping me out. I remember reading something once that people thought L.A. was some sort of paradise, but it's really just a desert that someone decided to build a city on top of. When I first got to L.A., it seemed like such a multi-colored place, a real live wire. For a guy like me at that point in my career, all the doors were open. When i wrote that song, I was spending a lot of time with a friend of mine, Cinjun Tate, from the band Remy Zero. He was over at my house and he'd met the girl he ended up marrying (Alyssa Milano). He'd written this song for her, "Life in Rain." And I was thinking about how happy he was. And I was thinking about, like, for all the fun and great times and bright lights I'd been seeing, it had been really hard for me to kee p anything special. It can get a little empty sometimes. So I started writing a song contrasting the bright lights of my life with this desert idea. The whole thing was just wiping me out. That's the thing about deserts: Some people think they're dead places, and other people think they're the most full of life of anyplace there is. L.A. is the same way. Mrs. Potters Lullaby Back to the Top "I had been to a movie and had a fantasy of falling in love with someone on screen. And I thought about how ridiculous that was, that your life can be so tied up with these people who dont really exist." Duritz proves unusually coy about who the real Mrs Potter might be although rumours say Monica Potter who played the wife of Robin Williams in Patch Adams. Mrs. Potters Lullaby, Colorblind, 4 Days, Kid things Connection Back to the Top I wrote the chorus for that song after seeing a movie. I was having my usual actress problem/infatuation kind of thing. And I came home, and everybody was working, and I went into the piano room in the studio and started writing. I came up with the chorus music and the first chorus. And then I stopped and said to myself, "How can I write a whole song about someone I don't even know? It's not gonna go anywhere, it's a total dead end. It's automatically trite and false." But I was enthralled with it. I wondered what else I could do. Well, if you wanted to meet someone you didn't know, you'd have to introduce yourself. And so I thought I'd write a song about everything that had been running through my head the past few months. All the ways I've been feeling and what my life looks like and all the possibilities, and . . . all the sort of romance flying around my head right now. I centered it all around the idea of talking to someone up on the movie screen. I ended up writing the song and played it for a friend of mine. He happened to know a friend of this actress and told her about it and one day, it was like a Monday, and we were gonna record "Mrs. Potters Lullaby" that night, and I get a phone call from my friend asking me if I'd like to have dinner with her and her friend that night. "She wants to meet you and is totally blown away by the whole song thing, but she wants to meet you in a comfortable situation." So the four of us go to dinner that night and it was bizarre. We totally hit it off; she is a really great girl. And she says to me, "So what's up with this song?" I said, "Here's a tape of just me doing the song at the piano, but if you really want to hear it though, we're about to go record it and it's only about a half mile from here." 'Cause I had to have dinner near there so I can get back to work. As soon as I get back from dinner we're gonna start this. And so her and her friend and my buddy and I all walked into the studio, and I said to everybody, "Hey, this is Mrs. Potter! We're gonna record this song now." And they all looked at me like I was crazy because they didn't know their parts, and I told them all to shut up and we began. And basically everybody got in the room together and we played it once through, first time we'd ever done it as a band. And I finished singing it and I went and talked to Dennis and I said, "Where's _____?" "She's outside crying." She told me, "This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. But I don't want to listen out here. Can I come in the piano room with you? I feel weird sitting out here in front of these people." So she came in the room with me and we proceeded to play that, and it was awesome; everyone was playing out of the top of their skulls. And then she left a couple of days later to go out of town, and I wrote "Colorblind" at home, thinking about how badly I wanted to be pulled out of myself by somebody. Thinking that maybe I was ready for something different now. And then, I hadn't heard from her in like four days, and so I wrote "Four Days" about feeling badly, wanting something better to happen, and trying to keep cool about it and not fuck it up. And finally she did call and we had this great long talk and I felt like I was 16. And I said to her, "Doesn't this remind you of those phone conversations you had when you were 16 and you are so excited and on your bed talking to somebody?" And I was in the middle of working on a song and I told the band that I had this song, and I knew how it was gonna sound and I had everything in place in my head, and I went under the piano and I wrote "Kid Things," hidden at the end of the album, which was about, just that. And that was the last song I wrote for the album. And a little while later we were working on "Mrs. Potter's" and it sounded like shit. And by this time I was dating her. But then " Mrs. Potter's" just stunk; all the overdubs we'd done and everything, it was just bad. And I was over her house one day, and she was playing a tape of it, and I thought it was awesome. When I asked her where she'd gotten it, she told me that the first night she came by, Dennis had given her a tape as she was leaving of one take that we had done that evening. I pull it out and check it out and it was take four. I played it for everyone and it blew them away, all of us forgetting we had recorded it. We'd been fucking with the sound of it in dumb ways, basically overthinking the song. And we just matched the master with this little cassette and pulled some overdubs from other tracks, and Dan laid the harmonies on it and it was basically take four! Speedway Back to the Top This is kind of the continuation of mercury I think mercury was a song about being in a relationship with someone whos so crazy that it just kills you but you make all these excuses for it..and this song is about being addicted to that person, and knowing you got to break out of the addiction..I couldnt think of a title when we first wrote it and ben thought I should call it "Im outta here you bitch".. but it probably wasnt like the right mood, you would be able to tell that cause I screw up that mood everytime I tell that story... anyway I woke up one morning and for no good reason..just feels right.. this is called speedway. <<<Back