Songmail 2

To: You <3 From: Me.

Happy Feb!

The song for this month isn’t what I’d call a “fun” one. The working title for this - which is what we’ll call it for now— has been It Was Probably Rohypnol (poor thing). It’s about the time that I got roofied, though only in a very vague, metaphoric sense. But just a heads up! I’ll be talking about it in the little postscript section!

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The Song: It Was Probably Rohypnol (poor thing)

Verse: 

Cough it up,

Get it out

Yellow sheets and a black wedding gown

Dulled teeth and a fistful of sound

Cough it up,

Spit it out

Two left feet, unlaced and unbound.

Lighting a match, let the burn put it out



Chorus:

Poor thing, poor thing

Learning the sin of a well-buttoned blouse

Poor thing

Sweet thing

Nothing but skin to a surgeon’s house


Verse: 

So cough it up

Honey get out

A cup full of poison

Feel the eyes, like a hawk for a trout

Watch her dance, catch her falling, adrift on the sea of the crowd


Chorus: 
So poor thing, poor thing

Learning the sin of leaving the house

Poor thing

Sweet thing

To them you’re nothing but skin, hands, lips, and a mouth,

So honey get out

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Postscript

(This is a section in which I’ll be writing a little bit about the lyrics!)

As I wrote at the top of this letter, this song is about getting roofied. I was at the Abbey in West Hollywood with some friends and had ONE drink- I don’t even remember putting it down— and about halfway through it, I noticed that I was dizzy. Sound went weird- my head was swimming— I remember making myself throw up — and that’s it. Thankfully, I was there with friends who kept me safe and eventually got me to the hospital (the one I was born in, funnily enough) and I owe them so much for that. There are hours of my memory missing. Though I had apparently been semi-awake the whole time, the next thing I remember was “waking up” in the E.R. hallway, unable to stop shaking.

The thing that really got to me afterwards was the knowledge that someone looked at me for at least half a second and didn’t see a person. I had recurring nightmares about it for nearly half a year afterwards, and still do sometimes.

How did this song get to the “poor thing” refrain? Well, I kept trying to write about the incident at the Abbey after it occurred, but couldn’t find the words.

A few months later, though, stumbled across some lyrics that I had written after seeing the movie Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos). In the movie, the main character (Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone) is treated like a doll, traded between men until she grows into her own sense of self/awareness of the world. Her body is not her own until she learns that it can (and should) be. I have a clear memory of walking home after seeing the movie with friends, reeling with the desire to write something in response to the film we had just seen. I had no clue then that the lyrics I jotted down would eventually became the bones of this song.

Somehow, the words that I wrote on that walk fit almost perfectly into my experience of being roofied. After writing some new lyrics and shifting old ones, It Was Probably Rohypnol (poor thing) came into being.

There’s not much more to say about the writing of this song other than the fact that it’s a more metaphor-heavy/vague song than what I tend towards these days. In the two brief songwriting classes I got to take at school, one of the notes I kept getting was that my songwriting can sometimes be too non-specific, so I’ve mostly beaten that quality out of my brain as a writer. But how do you write about something that you can’t get a true grasp on? Something that slippery and full of fear and forgetting? I don’t know what the answer should be, but my answer was this.

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P.P.S:

Here’s what I’ve been listening to lately:

Listening these days to:

Pursuit

by Mhaol (Irish post-punk band)

Dreamcatcher

by Marty O’Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra (banjo, the kind of porch music that would sound good with crickets in the background)

My Son My One

by Molly Pease et. al (weird choral track, floaty, lots of dissonance)

Want Want Want

by Annabelle Dinda (I’m in my hater girl era) (that’s a lie, I have too much love for the world to be a real hater)

ok thats all! love ya!

(And remember, kids, friends don’t let friends go to the Abbey!)