Recorded November 2006 in Huntington Beach, California.

For as tacky and cliche as the lyrics inarguably are, this song is nonetheless, for me, an absolute contender for my "best of all time." Just the whole messy vibe of it, all dripping with despondent melancholy and shimmering with damn-near-perfect lo-fi effervescence, it kind of gets me every time. The drums were so fucked up, I had just bought the crappy starter kit from Guitar Center and had no clue how to mic it, or how to tune the snare for that matter. The snare sounds like a big, rattly trash can and it's pretty great. I didn't really have time to dial in all those details; I felt like I was about to keel over and die when I was recording this, so it was sort of like, "hurry up and finish before you die," because in my hysterical emotional state, I actually though that the final recording would act as some magic transmission to my ex that would somehow change her mind and re-vitalize a relationship that, if I am to be perfectly straightforward, was never all that "vital" anyway. What actually happened was I was asked to make "no more sad songs"! So I guess it did have some effect, most likely that of annoyance (I laugh now; not so, then!)

Arrangment-wise, this has a bit of an old Flaming Lips feel, with the fucked up acoustic guitar strumming and fuzzed-out lead bits, while vocally this might've been the closest I've ever done to a John Lennon imitation (which isn't really that close at all... so I'm not sure what I'm even talking about.) The slide guitar and vocal delivery are just so fucking SAD, which I really WAS at the time, this being the first song thrown down in a fervor after the real and final terminus of my first relationship, unimaginably awful at the time, but absolutely and irresistibly delicious as experienced through this song now and forever after. That bridge, "I think about you all the time," oh god, such lame lyrics but the delivery is so sincere and captures the feeling so well that it actually just works, and quite well. There's definitely a reason most people think this song is very good, despite being very badly recorded and performed. I think it does have something very special.

The backstory on the chord progression is that I had been kicking it around for at least a year prior. I would always play around with it, improvise on it, when I was hanging out at Chloe's house. It was kind of something I had come up with for her, or at least associated with her in my mind. I was never sure if she liked it much... probably not, but that kind of goes with the whole weirdly masochistic theme of my fascination with her from the beginning. At any rate, after getting totally (gloriously?) shit on at the end of the whole thing, it felt quite poetic to finally trot out this little progression and immortalize it in this sort of choked-up anthem of shell-shocked loss and supreme self-pity.

I've observed, over the long term, one of my difficulties in songwriting to be capturing those really breathtaking emotions that I've experienced ad nauseum, capturing them accurately in my songs. But this stands as one particularly proud exception where I really think I got it right; spot on, even. Of course, in this case, it was completely out of my control. I was totally out of my head when I laid this all down. I guess that's probably why it worked so well then and still works now.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I do.