Love Will Tear Us Together
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Artist:
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Album:Love Will...
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Track:Love Will...
I wrote my first song when I was thirteen, a short piano piece of no very great interest, dedicated to my piano teacher, who was extremely hot. It was kind of a rip-off of Beethoven's ??Für Elize??, so I inserted her name instead of Elize and it got chosen to conclude a piano recital, which was supposedly something of an honor. Not an entirely deserved honor, I might add; there were at least two other pianists who were clearly better than I. Such is the power of love songs.Since then I'd say that about half the songs I've written are about love in one way or another. But since I started adding lyrics, none - at least none that was addressed to a specific girl - has met with anything like the same approval from its subject.The truth is, once I started going out with flesh and blood girls, I discovered that love was not the state of uninterrupted bliss I'd imagined. I was horrified to learn that girls actually ??do?? care if you give them flowers, that they really do give a damn about clothes, that they have hormonal mood swings unlike anything I could have pictured. [Editor's Note: I had no sisters, only brothers, and before I got to high school, I had only attended schools for boys - girls were things I read about in biology textbooks.]Now mind you; this wasn't all bad. I was actually kind of glad to run into so many surprises, even if I didn't like all of them (and I ??did?? like many of them - for instance, I discovered girls were far better readers, better conversationalists, possessed a delicacy of feeling that I learned a lot from, and a sense of mischievous playfulness that I soon came to realize signaled trust, and which I found bewitching), and of course their anatomical mysteries occupied, realistically, about every third thought that ran through my brain.And yet, where boys might be oafish or violent, I was surprised by the ??cruelty?? of girls. I got into two fistfights during that time with other boys (very unwillingly), the only two I've ever been in. One was with a kid who fancied himself a karate master and unexpectedly decided to demonstrate his skills on me, and one was with a kid who mistakenly thought I'd punched him from behind in a crowd. A stitched lip, a black eye, and from the instant it ended, we were friends for life (I still keep in contact with both of them). If two girls got into a fight? Well, there wouldn't be any punching. It would just become a matter of spending every single waking moment until one of them died trying by whatever means possible to destroy each other's lives completely. Fights made boys into best friends; they made girls into Siamese fighting fish.I still can't pretend to understand the female mind fully, but my impression is that in romantic matters, guys tend to be rather open books, and if they keep a secret or two, it's usually something less interesting than they realize, whereas girls (again; these are simply my own impressions) seem to be darting in and out of concealed realms, choosing at every moment what they'll hide or disclose.Well, enough of my half-baked ramblings. The point is that no love song worth the name is or should ever be unalloyed, worshipful adoration. Screw that. I've had five serious girlfriends since I started writing songs, and not one of them has ever been happy with a love song I wrote about them - which disappoints me. Like I said, women tend to have a richer literary sensibility, to my experience, than men, but having eventually grasped that treacle like, say, "I Just Called to Say I Love You" is what they prefer to be told, I learned long ago simply not to tell them which songs are about them. I believe this is what Kafka meant when he said "Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way."
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