Chris' Songs - Don't You See

When we first performed this song at the Sheldon Concert Hall, a number of my friends got weirded out by it and by me (I sing the solo). It's a pretty serious song about a guy who is obsessed with a girl. Yes, it is based on a true story, but like a lot of songs, it is exagerrated; I'm not as weird as the main character in the song, and what happened here is not what happened in real life. But a real life experience let me see how people change who they are and what they are like to a certain degree according to who they are around. Here are the lyrics--I'll let you read through them first before commenting on them...

Don't You See

Analize
Mask disguise
See your eyes even when I'm sleeping

Search for sign
Redefine
Toe the line that I haven't crossed for years

Don't you see that I'm not strong enough to fight my heart?
Could it be that you don't know your power?
Look at me and all of my barriers just fall apart.
Don't you see what you're doing to me?

Glance exchange
Static change
Rearrange making it look unscheduled

Chasing blind
Leave behind
What I find is that I lost my essence

Don't you see that I'm not strong enough to fight my heart?
Could it be that you don't know your power?
Look at me and all of my barriers just fall apart.
Don't you see what you're doing to me?

You see what I've become
In this pendulum
That keeps me swinging
Back and forth
And all a blur
In motion
Hypnotize
And I'm lost in your eyes

Don't you see that I'm not strong enough to fight my heart?
Could it be that you don't know your power?
Look at me and all of my barriers just fall apart.
Don't you see what you're doing to me?

Unfortunately, I don't have sound capability to put up a clip of this. It's pretty dark sounding (we call it our grunge song).

The lyrics are written, in large part, in parallel. By that I mean that, in the verses, the first words/phrases go together, the second ones go together, etc. The first words/phrases: Analize, Search for sign, Glance exchange, and Chasing blind, are outward actions that the main character are doing towards the girl. However, they are very introverted actions that he keeps to himself. The second words/phrases: Mask disguise, Redefine, Static change, and Leave behind, are all things that the main character does to himself.

When writing, I like to play with things. One thing I did here was to have phrases that both contradict themselves and are ambiguous. "Mask disguise" sounds redundant (a mask IS a disguise), so "mask" could be describing the disguise, or it could mean that he is hiding (or masking) the fact that he IS disguising. Disguising what? How he really feels and eventually who he really is. "Static change" sounds contradictory, but it just means that who he is is constantly changing to fit what he thinks she would want him to be. "What I find is that I lost my essence"--so what he's found is what he has lost, another contradiction.

"Toe the line that I haven't crossed for years" may need a little explaining. He hasn't crossed the line of being in a relationship for years. Now he is toeing the line, which is what runners do before a race starts. So, he is ready to leap into a relationship (in his mind), something he hasn't even dabbled in for years.

This guy seems to be one sick puppy, but he's really in all of us, or has been in the past at some point. Is the girl someone you know? No, very few people who know me would know this person. And that doesn't matter anyway, since I really exagerrated things quite a bit to get to those lyrics. Did you ever hear Peter Gabriel's "Family Snapshot"? I bet he never shot someone in a motorcade, but he obviously had to think about it to have written that song.

-Chris Tess

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chris@rarb.org