The tune is meant to be very folky in its melodic and lyrical approach, but I wanted to juxtapose that with a sort of loose, dark, rock feel that would drive the song.  I have to credit that almost tribal, brooding drum beat to my drummer/BFF Brian Prokop.  He creates many, many special things with the disorganized demos I throw at him, but this was one of his finer achievements.  I borrowed vaguely from the music from the film, but it's mainly designed to be something you wouldn’t be surprised to hear Mark Knopfler playing on and singing.  Also, format-wise, I lifted a bit from Billy Joel's brilliant "Ballad of Billy the Kid" in the sense that the song is about someone else, but is bookended by blurbs about myself, how I relate to the song's subject at large. 

I really was 25 when I left home, a common man forced to become an urban soldier and fend for myself in the Big City.  "A broken man with a brand new set of lies..." I find that when you are destroyed by some personal trauma, it's suddenly amazing how easy it is to drop everything else you hold dear and start over with new blueprints that you drew yourself, without the help of the real architect.  "And all these ghosts hide in the gold around my eyes..." My eyes are the kind of hazel that's streaked with specks of gold.  In one of those lighter oases lies a dark spot that I used to joke contained all my demons.  Well, gotta keep em somewhere, right?  "With the smoke and rage just waiting to arise?"  I really just loved the image.  The idea of waiting for the fight to boil over, because God knows it's been far too calm up to this point, and things are about to turn ugly again.  Any war where the shooting suddenly stops, they're not rethinking.  They're reloading. 

The second verse imagines a soldier in the desert who has been there for quite some time.  How long?  Long enough to wonder why he's still there taking lives when he has a newborn waiting at home for his safe return.  Futility in war becomes so much more hopeless when you have something to look forward to.  And death seems so much less appealing when you have someone to live for. 

The third verse wraps up the tale in an admittedly dreary fashion, calling to mind how that grand posthumous glory all would be war heroes daydream about is little more than childish cinematic fantasy.  More often than not, the greatest heroes in a war are the ones who receive the least recognition for the most sacrifice.  They carry someone else's moral imperative on their shoulders until they sink under its weight into an unmarked grave, where they are nothing more than an ingredient in the soil.  And their children won't know them as heroes.  Their children won't know them at all.

On a side note, I did write another verse to the song that was to be between the 2^nd and 3^rd verses that ultimately was cut for being just a touch morbid.  Here it is:

A skeleton says, "The end is nigh"/On the roadside all his friends are piled high/On their backs they are laughing at the sky/As the next parade of corpses marches by.

The choruses all begin with the same line and end with a different one to reflect the stanza that preceded it.  None are more important, though, than the last one - "We will burn this kingdom down."  And we will.  If we aren't careful, we will fall like the New Roman Empire that we have become.  And it will happen by our own hand.  We will have no one to blame.  Yet, I'm sure we'll blame someone anyway.  We will point fingers, but ultimately, our own flag will be our shroud if we don't change things, and change them fast. 

The outtro to the song is a callback to the intro, with our storyteller returning home less than a year after he left, same as her ever was.  Are any of the stories he told true?  Or were they all simply designed to bring justification to an unjustifiable situation?  And even if they were all lies, every last one...would it really matter as long as they made their point?  A lie is the truth if enough people believe it.  Or, sometimes, just the right people.

Structurally, this is a song with very few surprises.  It relies more heavily on the melody and a, hopefully, disarming straightforwardness in the lyrics.  It revolves around one Fourth of July, when I had first moved to Queens.  I wasn't yet comfortable in my new surroundings, and my roommates, who were co-workers of mine at the time, all decided to get together to celebrate.  I was working as a doorman at Caroline's on Broadway, a comedy club, for $10/hr and though I made some friendships there that are lasting to this day, I generally remained removed from the club’s central social scene. I was probably rebelling against the idea that I was there at all, mostly because I felt my destiny was calling me far, far elsewhere.  So, when everyone came to my apartment to meet up with their various preferred beers, I tried to blend in.  I tried to pretend I was confident and comfortable and that the party began and ended in my illustrious presence.  The truth?  I was insecure, anxious, and didn't belong.  I distinctly recall slipping away into my Altoid box-sized bedroom, sitting on the floor with a Bud Light and plucking the chord progression on my guitar that would later become the main skeleton of the song.  Even with my back to the bed, which was against the far wall, my outstretched legs still almost reached the door.  Even in my most private place in the house, I was confined, trapped, a prisoner in my own temporary home. 

I was watching everyone through the door, having a great time, laughing, commiserating...and the longer I watched, the more claustrophobic I felt.  But then, what began to infuriate me more was how I was reacting.  Why was I so opposed to the idea of assimilating?  Why did I feel like such a misfit in a place that should have been a comfort zone for me?  Honestly?  Sometimes it's easier to wallow in drama and shroud yourself in insecurity, blaming others for not accepting you when it's really your own fault for being too introverted to place yourself in a new situation.  It's so much simpler to play the emo "no one gets me" card instead of putting your neck on the chopping block of other people's judgment and acceptance, even though those things shouldn't matter anyway.  But when you're young, not only does it matter, it's life and death.  Who am I if not popular? If not well liked? I could hate myself so long as everyone else loved me.  And love me they did.  And hate myself I did. 

Anyone can tell you how to bake a cake.  They can detail all the steps meticulously, list every last ingredient in each precise measurement but you'll still bake a shitty cake until you've had enough practice to eyeball it.  This is how I feel about me.  I feel like I know, in every minute detail, the man I want to be.  I know the raw materials I need, and I know the steps I need to take to get there.  But without the benefit of life experience, it's hopeless.  It's like I'm kinda staring at this outline shaped like me, trying to figure out what colors to pour into it, but I don't know myself well enough to finish the assignment.  That's why the first verse of the song is actually addressed to myself...trying to figure out what it is everyone else sees in me on the off chance maybe I'd then see it for myself.  Not that anyone should define themselves by anyone else's opinion of them, but when you're young and insecure, it carries far more weight than it ever, ever should.  Also, in the first verse I say, "You said that this place would set me free. But it's killin me..." The "place" I'm talking about is not a literal place per se, it is simply referring to being out on your own, away from the safety net of paternal care and financial security.  In short, adulthood. 

But adulthood can be lonely. The second verse, I took some half-mocking heat for, from guys who said I was being too honest.  But seriously, what guy at some point in their lives doesn't wish they could have a new girl everyday?  BUT-and this is where I took the heat - I believe that desire stems less from an animalistic need to copulate as it does a more childlike, insecure need for affirmation.  A need that, even when we are in committed relationships, overpowers us into an insatiable hunger for outside attention, simply as proof that we've still "got it."  And why do we need that?  Well...maybe we're just lonely.  But then, how do you know it's loneliness if that's how you've always felt.  A chronic pain in your shoulder loses the classification of "pain" after a length of time, because by then, it's simply how your shoulder feels, day in and day out.  Maybe that's what our inherent human loneliness is.  Just a standard chronic pain that has slowly and quietly, so as not to arouse the heart's suspicion, become the norm. 

I wish I could say this song was at all patriotic, but the truth is, it's a very selfish, introverted song about simply trying to become the person you want to be; which is really nothing more than a scattered, hybrid mix of every quality you've ever seen and admired in someone else, fictional or real.  The movie star, the comic book hero, the rock star, the charming businessman, the dude on the subway who just didn't give a shit what anyone else thought...the list goes on and on and on.  But I believe these aspirations will ultimately lead you astray.  They may make you popular and desirable for a time, but they are molding you into something you're not, and therefore something you could never maintain.  They are empty projections of the characters that we play, but don't really believe in.  And true freedom does not lie in those projections; it lies in the hard fought battle it takes to ignore those very images, and to strip ourselves down to who were really are. And THEN the real work starts...learning to love that person in spite of their many flaws, downfalls and blemishes.  But once you do find and love that person?  Well, light up the fireworks, because there is no greater freedom than that of a well-examined, truthful life. 

For this one, I'm dressed as a giant bee to promote the Old Country Buffet, a restaurant I have never been to and that I can now never go to.  Most managers or agents would probably balk at the idea of their legit client dressing in a mutant bee costume and screaming into a megaphone.  Not me.  In this economy, there is little room for dignity.  And hey, it pays the bills. 

Will James Lipton probably dig this up one day in a creepy, glassy-eyed nearly comatose segue?  Will Oprah put this up on the screen behind her during a pivotal moment in our interview, then give away free puppies taped to the bottom of every seat?  Or will I be the next Verizon guy, launching a campaign that will make me millions and be known worldwide?  Time will tell.  Don't be cruel, time.  I got bills to pay.

Hey, I heard Brad Pitt used to dress as a hot dog or something, and hand stuff out.  Of course, I may have just made that up to avoid crying in the shower.  Hey, this kind of stuff will keep me humble, if nothing else.  I'll return next week with the Imperfect Man album blog series with "Independence Day."  I hear this blog series is creating a serious buzz.  Get it?  Shoot me. 

Many of my tunes contain an underlying, if not subtle, lean towards the spiritual.  None, however, are as overt and self-aware I think as "My Prayer." 

I was raised a fairly strict Catholic.  My parents were regular Sunday church-goers, they said their graces and sent us to CCD.  Nothing creepy or cultish, just the usual "we've been infused with the fear of God, so you should be too cuz it's all we know" type stuff.  When people would ask if I was religious, I used to give my stock answer, "Well, I was raised Catholic, but then I grew a brain."  As I've grown older, I see those words were spoken out of rebellion and youthful need to be angry about something to prove that my life was difficult and interesting.  The sentiment, however, stays largely the same.  As I've grown into a different and more malleable set of beliefs, I have shed my younger, purer skin. And this song is an examination of the various ghosts I've left behind in a journey towards enlightenment that will likely not culminate until the microscopic, lucid moment immediately preceding my death.  And if the journey ends before that?  That's not the road coming to a dead end, it's simply me not being strong enough to continue searching.  And if I do ever tire of this search, I don't deserve the riches that would have been waiting for me at the end anyway. 

I'd have to say "My Prayer" is probably the most parallel song I've written to date.  It doesn't follow the traditional (and hackneyed, yet annoyingly effective) verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus formula.  Yet there's something oddly consistent in its inconsistency.  The rhyme scheme falls in weird places, but they are consistently weird, if that makes sense.  There's also an intentional dichotomy in the chord structure; playing two repeating chords with the left hand (F#m and D), and two totally different chords on top of those with the right (E and A, respectively).  The verses all contain something of a prayer at the end...and also, a question.  This particular quirk is fairly reflective of how I view faith and religion as a whole most times.  I have my beliefs, and I'm a man of great faith, but at the end of the day, I'm a confused and aimless grenade launcher of questions, simply hoping just one will land in the yard of someone who knows how to diffuse it.  In addition to those questions, the song also begins with one, and it's one that is not only universal, but terrifyingly frequent one: "Where do we go from here?"
 
The first verse goes on to detail the humbling decay of young pride and false, costumed courage; and the subsequent emergence of a new and spiritual being; naked, untouched and untrusting.  It describes the desire to simply vanish when we realize that all our past glories and successes are but meaningless trifles when they are unshared. These uninspired successes slowly fade, become insignificant , until they eventually become failures.  The moments before I sleep are the truest, when I strip off all my heavy pretentions of my daily armor; taking a knee and giving over to a God that I am never certain of, but will always faithfully turn to.  And when I do, I always wonder if my prayerful bleating gets hopelessly lost in the unmastered mix of all the other desperate cries from the weary flock.  But maybe these prayers don't need to be answered.  Maybe they just need to be said out loud. 

The second verse takes the stance that Catholicism forces too many of its followers to live in fear, rather than in joy.  This is a mistake.  That we are meant to do good in order to avoid the fire and brimstone, instead of doing it because it's simply the right thing to do.  When they came up with this plan, I don't think they were planning ahead to the long term effects of such a temporary spiritual medication.  We've now become mostly do-nothing, self-centered blowhards. We do good deeds in order that they might be repaid after we buy ourselves a slot in heaven with them; when we should simply be treating others the way we'd want to be treated.  Love others as we wish to be loved. Forgive others as we wish to be forgiven.  Living life for the reward that comes after it is selfish, cheap and unenlightened.  Living life as if life itself is its own reward?  That's the ticket. 

There's an interesting lyric in this verse that says "I could draw a line between who I am and what I've seen..."  I guess what I mean by that is that many people see their lives as a composite of everything they've ever seen, everything they've heard, been shown, been taught.  They become animatronic amalgams of everyone they've ever met. Soulless, diluted composites.  And instead of learning to think for themselves, they simply accept what has been put before their eyes as the truth, no matter who it is that's showing it to them.  I try not to do this.  To always ask questions and never accept anything as truth quite so easily.  You could call that paranoid, and maybe it is...but I've made it this far.  And I made it this far virtually in the dark. 

The bridge became a very lovely cello solo, but before that it contained these lyrics: "I'm having trouble believing something forced/Since when did faith and reason get divorced/Seems that everyone who passes thru these doors/Isn't fit to walk upon these sacred floors./ I used to think that I was scared to bleed/For any cause for which I had no need/Now I know that there are things much bigger than me/And nothing's lost upon a single bended knee." 

Didn't serve the ultimate purpose of the song, but worth noting.

The third verse drops before it finally swells, putting the punctuation mark on the song, as if signaling the conclusion of a Catholic Mass.  Growing up attending these masses, I always got the distinct and sad impression that most of the attendees were there only because they're obligated to be.  The message of beauty, peace, and comfort found in the often miraculous stories of the Bible give way to passionless, zombie-like prayers, recited rote, as if even a single improvised word would incur the wrath of the Big Guy himself.  Kneel here, stand here, sing this song (with no inflection or joy, please), hold hands here, give us money here, go home, thank you, please come again.  It's a mechanical sequence of carefully planned events, rather than a celebration of joy, a bastion of hope, and an impetus to do good in the world.  You can convince a man that God exists.  You just can't convince him that He's on our side.  It was this mentality that I felt dragging me down as I grew older and more comfortable in my own faith. And I mean MY faith.  Just because it's not the faith I was trained to have, doesn't make my version any less real or any less potent. So, I wrote a lyric that to this day carries a great deal of meaning to me: "I will dare to leave my ghosts behind."  Farewell to the hurts, the mistakes, the demons and the bad habits.  Your days of haunting me are over. 

This song ends with the question, "Can it heal me?" re: Faith.  Well, can it?  I go in and out.  But I keep coming back to the same answer.  Yes.  I think it can.  The ghosts will leave scars.  But scars don't show that you've been hurt.  They show that you've healed. 

A great song often happens when good sense is kind enough to step out of the room long enough for you to write it free of judgment. "Imperfect Man" was conceived in just such an atmosphere, and executed with just enough lack of regard for a finished product (see "Empty Handed" in a few weeks).  The result is, if nothing else, honest.  A simple song, I wrote it whilst sitting on my bed in Jersey with an acoustic guitar.  It was one of those nights when I was feeling just disillusioned and jaded enough to pick myself apart, but only to examine, rather than cruelly dissect. 

At the time I was shooting an independent film called "You Tell Me" (available on Netflix), a romantic comedy about how we allow other people's perceptions to poison our own, particularly in relationships.  When principal photography was completed and post-production had begun, the filmmakers found themselves with a beautiful montage when the film climaxes without a song to go with it.  I had given a demo of “Imperfect Man” to my director/friend/co-star Josh Cary a while back, and he had passed it along to the editor.  The editor was actually the one to ultimately suggest my song to accompany the bittersweet collection of scenes that acts as the film's final act, and Josh agreed it was, ironically, perfect.  He decided we should re-record a shorter version of the song for the film, but produce it fully in a studio.  He found a producer named Charles Newman to do the job, and once we had finished Charles asked me if I had any other songs, and suggested we work together on an album.  The rest, as they say, is history. 

Musically, I wanted to keep the arrangement sparse.  Dulling the snare by loosening the springs, keeping the acoustic guitar track a bit dirty, the glockenspiel, the beautiful and pained cry of the pedal steel in the third verse; all of these things serve to put you in the room with the song and feel intimately connected to it. The guitar solo in the middle was meant to smell a bit like the Allman Brothers I suppose, but whatever it came out as, I love.  My guitarist at the time, Mike, was a remarkable soloist, but was never quite as good under the pressure of the ominous red record light.  So, when we told him about the solo we wanted, I conspired with Charles, and we told him to rehearse one, and we wouldn't record it.  Mike nailed it, of course, and that is what you hear on the record. 

Lyrically, the approach was meant to be primarily folky.  Verse 1 is meant to send the rather distinct impression that we are all here on borrowed time.  All of us are human, mortal, and have an expiration date that isn't printed anywhere on us.  So we are best served by accepting our mortality now, coming to peace with our inherently flawed natures. and living in the best way we know how.  And if we don't know how to live well?  We better fucking learn. 

I would love to say that the powerful image of the "blood-dimmed tide" was my own, but it is actually a reference to the William Butler Yeats poem "The Second Coming."  The following section of the song, the "countdown," if you will, was actually something that just came out when I first started writing the song, when I was still just playing around with the two main chords.  I was toying with melodic ideas, and that sort of descending, leapfrogging arpeggio came tumbling out in the form of numbers, followed by the phrase "I'm counting down," simply because that's exactly what I was doing.  What was I counting down?  That came later, when I realized in my somewhat depressed state that I was weighing the pros and cons of my continued life here.  The "heart shaped bloodstain" was a double-entendre, in reference both to my history as a cutter and to my propensity to wear my heart on my sleeve in so obvious a way that it was begging to be stolen by reckless and unfamiliar hands. 

The second verse begins with "chasing my own damn tail."  Originally, the space immediately after that lyric was filled by the lyric "Looking to buy hope that's not for sale."  I removed it at the behest of my good friend and musical genius Josh Kutchai, who helped me arrange this song into something less monotonous.  If the first verse is about spending what little time we have looking for purpose, the second is about finding that reason in a person that, in some way, you've always known, whether you actually have or not.  It's sort of just taking a large step back, looking at your life, and giving over the controls to someone or something other than you. 

Finally, the third verse addresses the weight of regret I believe we all carry.  I believe people who say they have no regrets are full of pounds and pounds of shit.  I see their point:  that we should learn from the poor decisions we've made, grow from them, yadda yadda.  But we still have regret.  That's why there's a fucking word for it. .  Also, there used to be another lyric sandwiched into the last line of the song, which used to read, "I won't know until the day I'm gone, if the love that I gave is gonna carry me on, or if God will leave the light on for Imperfect Man."  Notice, not AN imperfect man.  I wanted, for the last verse, to broaden the scope to envelop all of us.  For not a single one of us knows, beyond the oppressive shade of doubt, that we are living this life right.  Now, whether there's an afterlife or not is a topic we could debate until the day we die; which is the day we'll know who was right. But we're sure as hell gonna find out one day.  And when we do?  I sure hope whoever is there to meet me accepts flaws as currency. 

"Hammer to Fall" was one of only two songs on the album that I had to credit as co-written, due to the significant contributions of some incredibly capable musical minds.  This particular share of the credit lands in the lap of Mike Clifford, a good friend I used to be in a band with. He is a remarkable and pure singer/songwriter.  I started doodling with an idea on my piano years ago when I was still living with my parents.  It was a sort of traveling piano line in 3/4 time that I always liked but thought it had no future.  Then, later that year, Mike came over to jam, and translated the lick onto guitar as a sort of choppy, rhythmic, Dave Matthews-type lick (which at the time, he tended to do with everything, but in this particular case, it worked).  He then, sort of spur of the moment, spit out the lyrics to the front half of the first verse, "Crack of dawn is comin on, how long's this been goin on?"  He never got further than that, so I took the baton from there.  Same with the front two lines of the chorus, which I then also completed at a later date.  It was a sort of relay, I suppose, leading to the creation of a very straightforward, kind of formulaic, but catchy and honest pop song. 

This is also the only song so far that I've written where the chord progression to the verse and the chorus does not change at all.  So, it relies very heavily on the arrangement, which simply opens up wide on the chorus and soars till the rhythmic, stop-and-go verse cuts it off from flight again.  The bridge became a kind of waltz, per the suggestion of my producer - an idea that I liked at the time; and looking back, though I still appreciate the feel, I probably wouldn't have leaned quite so far in the baroque direction.  So it goes.  Also, an interesting tidbit; the pre-chorus lyric ("I can't live like this, I know..." etc) was actually an idea I "borrowed" from one of my heroes, the superhuman Martin Sexton.  I simply took the melody line to the chorus of  "Where Did I Go Wrong," and reversed it. 

This is one of those tunes that I think is pretty universally relatable, a goal I try to achieve with most, if not all, things I write.  This one in particular, though, seems to resonate a little more, well, resoundingly.  I'm not sure I've met a person who has not had the anxiety-ridden experience of "waiting for the other shoe to drop."  We call this waiting room any number of things, but my favorite has always been "waiting for the hammer to fall."  It's just a touch more accurate in the opinion of this songwriter, as it more vividly calls to mind a violent and probably unexpected sharp pain that will accompany whatever karma has stored up to repay your various indiscretions. 

 We all make mistakes, and when we do, it's like life is giving us a ticket and saying, "You won't know how, you won't know where, you won't know when...but one day, I'm gonna catch up to you...and on that day, you're gonna have to answer for this."  And so, we carry on, eating our breakfasts, doing our jobs, being human, all the while carrying the ever-growing beast on our backs knowing that we will someday be called upon to pay the piper.  What that means exactly?  I have no idea.  But we all fear it, whether that fear is rational or not.  For my money, it's not.  But that certainly doesn't mean it isn't there.  It is.  And it is hungry. 

I mention luck in the first verse of this song, a concept I have since ceased to believe in, but at the time, I was willing to cling to anything that would help pull me to safety.  It was a self-indulgent pity-party of a time for me, spent mostly reading letters from ex-girlfriends and getting intentionally drunk, often alone, off Woodbridge Pinot Grigio, sometimes even going so far as to keep a bottle in the crawlspace of the bedroom in my parents' house  (I lived above the garage.  Automatic refrigeration. Can't beat that).  Also, in the second half of the song, I say "These scars are starting to show."  I would love to say that was some not-so-clever emo metaphor for my internal strife.  Though it could double as that, the truth is, at the time, I was a cutter.  A self-destructive person by nature, I used to slice into my left arm-scissors, a pocket knife, anything convenient and sharp - and I was simply running out of places to hide the cuts.  A time in my life I regret, but a time that brought me a necessary contrast to the greater peace I enjoy today. 

Explaining any more of the lyrics would be sort of moot, as I believe they are pretty straightforward, and I will always choose to give my listeners more credit as opposed to less (a common mistake in all of entertainment is to underestimate, and subsequently insult, the intelligence of their audience...but I digress).  To this day I'm not entirely sure what I meant by the bridge.  "Right in front of my eyes, I have burned out a star...but have I gone too far?"  I guess it just sounded right.  Looking back, I suppose I was thinking that I was headed straight for a bright and successful future, and that in the few minute moments it takes to make an error, I had watched it fizzle to nothing.  But the way I see it now?  Starlight takes a massive amount of time to reach our eyes.  So even if my star has burned out?  It's gonna take a hell of a long time before I realize it. 

Though the song is not about sleeping with someone as coincidence would have it, the girl I wrote it about is the very the girl to whom I later lost my virginity (at the tender young age of 23...seriously). This ended up adding an entirely new meaning to the song.  I had already graduated from college, but I was back to rehearse for our agent showcase (I went to Mason Gross school of the Arts at Rutgers University for a degree in acting.  I graduated Magna Cum Laude.  Live in that wake.)  One day, on a break, I went to (gulp) the DINING HALL to grab a cheap but questionable lunch with some friends who were still attending the program.  While there, I was quickly introduced to a girl that vibrated with sensual energy and mystery.  Things were instantly electric.  We talked and talked for hours.  Slowly, all my friends and her friends filtered out of the place.  But us? We scarcely noticed.  The world around us had ceased to exist.  We ended up spending the rest of that day and night together, talking until the sun came up, and eventually passed out next to each other on a futon in a buddy's apartment that smelled like stale beer and cigarettes.  There was not a single physical moment shared that night, no alcohol, no funny business...it was just that intangible connection that happens sometimes between two people who least expect it.  When I woke up in the morning, I looked over and thought, "Who the hell is this person?  What the hell happened?"  And the answer, really, was nothing.  And yet, a whole hell of a lot HAD happened.  So I got up, left a note in her shoe, and proceeded to the Douglass Student Center, where I sat outside on a bench and started writing this song. 

In the years that followed, she and I developed a sporadic, fly-by-night romance that we always felt, but always knew was impossible.  In fact, it was likely the novelty of our first encounter that kept it alive.  A guitarist/singer in her own right, we began essentially trading off songs in a kind of song war.  She penned a tune called "Think on Me," after an old, old tune I had written called "Think on This."  It also inspired the final lyric to the chorus, "...thinkin on each other..."  In her song appears the line, "I'm finding it hard to sleep sometimes without your breath as a lullaby."  My volley on that particular serve ended up in the front lyric of Tuesday Morning's bridge: "You took my breath away, that's why I can't bring you tonight's lullaby." 

Even within the first two verses, you can sense the same transience and potential danger that we felt, but ignored, probably because the drama and mystery were simply that enticing.  By verse three, it was over, and stored away in the overstocked archives of fond, young memory.  I sometimes still think of that time when I smell cigarettes on someone’s breath and clothing.  I have no regrets about that time of my life, though there was probably a time when I had many.  Not anymore.  I've grown up, and with age comes a firmer understanding of the necessity of mistakes and the joys of foolish impulsiveness.   And though this particular song of mine probably contains the most contrived, forced and sophomoric lyric I have penned to date; it will still always hold a special, albeit saccharine, place in my heart.