LIGHTNING ROUND DAY 7.Like a lot of Gene Clark songs, this one is damned near perfect. I've been drawn to it for almost as long as I've cared about music for reasons that have changed along with me, but it has never gotten tiresome to me, and I doubt that it ever will. The recording is an anomaly in the Lightning Round in that it features a overdub of a harmony vocal, which was just too easy to do in no time at all at the last minute. It's also pretty bad, but in the Lightning Round spirit I wasn't greatly inclined to fuss about it.
I first truly learned this song to perform as the toast at my friend Simon's wedding, and that's what you're looking at as the cover art. In my mind that event seems to be well before Miranda was born, but as I think about it I realize that it was in fact the very year she was born, and so this fits into my early "lullabye" phase of learning and singing songs; I believe that's because this wedding was toward the end of a phase where I performed toasts at a lot of my friends' weddings, and always did it in the form of a song. I was proud of having become the go-to guy for that kind of thing, and believed it said more about my ability to maintain and grow friendships than any true musical talent. Ironically and sadly, due to some atrocious decisions I made in the subsequent years (about which I can't do anything at this point, having already asked for forgiveness, and of which others who have not been ostracized as I have were guilty as well) if most of these weddings were to be held today, I wouldn't even be invited. If you're interested in hearing what a bastard that makes me feel like, you can listen to this, the opening track on the Skates & Rays LP, and understand that I wrote it primarily as an indictment of not just the general human capacity for self-delusion but specifically my own. I mention it primarily because either nobody really seems to have worked out what's going on in that song, or nobody has really even listened to it in more than passing, which is understandable, because they could be listening to awesome Gene Clark songs instead.
Personnel: Rex
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