Track 08
TBH
Video coming soon · check back for the official track video
A frequent visitor to my placein the Grove
Its Place in the Story
The last song I wrote for the album, TBH actually stands for “This Broken Heart.” But some words are too hard to say, let alone see written out — especially as a title on an album cover, TBH.
It’s said that enlightenment is absolute cooperation with reality. By this point in the story, the “bargaining” of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief had given way to acceptance of a particularly hard and irredeemable reality. What’s left is how we choose to hold what remains — or whether we hold it at all. TBH lives in that inner world of self-bargaining and rationalization: to hold or not to hold. That is the question.
Our inner wisdom tells us to take the larger view:
It doesn’t matter anyway,
what might have been.
You’d be separated
in the final scene.
The part that clings says: Never mind. “This broken heart suits me just fine.”
I’m reminded of a line from R.E.M.’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine): “Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline.”
Sometimes we just inhabit that space. Sometimes for months. Sometimes for years. And while it may be difficult to simply choose to pivot away from a deep sense of loss, at some level, it’s still a choice.
This song is about declining that possibility — choosing instead to cling to a heartache because it’s all that remains of something precious.
Making a video that externalized an internal process was challenging.
All of this proved to be too much. I began having incredibly vivid, often frightening dreams. The nightmares would leave me waking with a start, disoriented, convinced for a moment that I was back in my bed in Miami. Hence, the song’s title.
Given the vivid dreams, a friend suggested I keep a dream journal and write down whatever I remembered upon waking. I took this on by recording the dreams in pre-coffee stream-of-consciousness prose, without regard for sentence structure, punctuation, or whether it made any sense — just letting it flow.
The nightmares were dark and vivid, filled with ghosts of past failures, missed opportunities, and self-recrimination, mostly shadows and images that seemed, as I wrote in the journal at the time, like the “imaginings of a sordid man.”
About a year later, I stumbled onto a chord progression and melody I liked and decided to try to craft lyrics from the entries in that nearly forgotten dream journal, adding another piece to the narrative that was taking shape. At first, I tried to limit myself to words I wrote in the journal, but eventually found I needed to stray outside it to fill things out. That said, it’s pretty faithful to what I wrote down upon waking.
A Few Words
I wrote this song on guitar, stumbling upon that E, C#7, A, B chord progression that suggests a whole world of melodies, mostly in that torch-song vein. Although I wrote it on guitar, I mostly heard it as the piano piece you can hear now.
The middle dream-sequence section came pretty quickly, too. I may prefer the acoustic guitar treatment I gave that section in the version included in the Vault. I thought about merging the two versions — borrowing the middle section from the alternative take — but I simply ran out of time.
Now you can hear them both.
Then again, so can I.
As I listened, I suddenly heard how the keyboard line underneath the verses and choruses could swap places with the melody and interlock in an entirely different way. This became the extended middle section where the keyboard figure became the guitar lead over the melody.
Having heard this in my head, I then had to figure out how to create a 20 second gap in the track to drop the new section in. It was a Saturday afternoon. I ended up cancelling my evening plans and spent a good six hours learning how to create the gap and then recording the new harmony and guitar parts. The hours likely felt like minutes, the way time always flew when I worked on a song. You can also hear that first extended version with the new middle section—drums still off– in the vault.
After a long while, I got better at bending Logic’s drummer to my will. The ironic thing is, even though I eventually got it to play in time, I still couldn’t get the feel I wanted using Logic’s drummer. I wanted the track to have a certain spring in its step to match the feeling. For that, I hired a drummer I met of Fiverr. Sadly, I’ve lost his name. It’s the only song on the album that features a real drummer.
A favorite burger place in the Grove. Formerly an institution, I believe it recently closed because of rising rents.
The Vault
Demos · Alternate Takes · Behind the Curtain
Early Demo
Original Short Version
An alternative, guitar-driven version. Sometimes I prefer this to the version that made the album. In the end, this stuck me as a bit too rough around the edges.
← Previous · Track 07
Nightmare on Franklin Street
Next · Track 09 →
River of Secrets