Game Shows Touch Our Lives

Lyrics

Dug up a fifth of Hood River gin
That stuff tastes like medicine
But I'll take it
It'll do

On the couch in the living room all day long
Music on the television playing our song[1]
And I'm in the mood
The mood for you

Turn the volume up real high
All of that money look at it fly
And you smoking like a chimney[2]
Shadows crawled across the living room's length
I held onto you with a desperate strength
With everything, with everything in me[5]
And I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing
On which our survival depends
People say friends don't destroy one another
What do they know about friends?

Thunderclouds forming cream white moon
Everything's going to be okay soon[3]
Maybe tomorrow
Maybe the next day[6]

Carried you up the stairs that night
All of this could be yours if the price is right
I heard cars headed down to oblivion
Up on the expressway
Your drunken kisses as light as the air
Maybe everything that falls down eventually rises
Our house sinking into disrepair
Ah, but look at this showroom filled with fabulous prizes[4]

Banter

I'll tell you how the song title was born. It was back when I had cable TV, or a satellite dish, rather. We sat around and watched a lot of TV in those days. That's why we don't have it now, 'cause we became hermits and it was really bad. So we're watching the E! channel one evening, and E! has run out of things to do True Hollywood Stories on, and bios. And so they start flashing in really grainy relief: Pat Sajak, Alex Trebek, Vanna White—yeah—Chuck Woolery, and the guy from Joker's Wild, whatever the hell that guy's name was. He was someone...anyway. So they're showing these, and they said "We laughed, we learned, in every way." And my wife ad-libs, she says "Game shows touch our lives." And I went "Oh, I gotta write that shit down!"(2005-06-18)
You may hear a lot of talk in your life about the hour of reckoning. People saying, you know, people talk about the moments that they face, as if, you know, as if they got a notice from some office two weeks before the moment was going to come, saying, 'There’s a moment coming in two weeks, you might want to get your ass ready.' You won’t get any such notice, there is no such office for this delivery. Instead, you may be sitting on the sofa, three beers deep and two white Russians, staring at the television thinking to yourself, 'This can’t last forever.' Hoping, praying that it will --or won’t! -- last for the rest of your life, because whatever comes next, it could be worse! You have evidence in your past that it could in fact be worse. But at the same time, you know it won’t be that previous worse, it’ll be some new thing. We live in an age that preaches the value of new things, but I’m here to tell you there some new things that are not so good! Some new things suck gigantic asses! All day long! This song is a song about a couple of people who are face to face with some of those gigantic new asses to suck! They have a lovely television! I’m glad that I gave them a TV! (2006-11-03)
Look man, if you move across the country for somebody you figure you're gonna do more than just sit around and get drunk and watch television, right? Wrong. (2007-09-21)
This is a song about how you find yourself in a relationship that's really not going where you had hoped it would go, and you say to yourself in the seventh year of that relationship, 'Why am I still hanging out here? You know, that's seven years off my life, I only have so many on this planet. That's seven years I've given to this -- well, I'll stick it out another seven, see what happens.' I'm here to tell you that you don't have to give those second seven, really, seven seems like a fair point at which to start cutting losses. But you know and I know that you're not even here tonight if you're into the whole concept of cutting losses. (2008-11-09)
In our hours of triumph and in the dark pits we dig for ourselves; when we’re with our families and when we’re all by ourselves; at home, in a motel; far from home, at a friend’s house for a couple of weeks… game shows touch our lives. (2012-05-06)
I feel if I were about my business, I'd perform that one [Werewolf Gimmick] in a werewolf mask. But I'm never gonna perform that one in a werewolf mask, I'm telling you that right now. You can give me a hundred werewolf masks. I will try them all on. But when I play the song there will be no mask. This is a song about alcoholism. [Woo!] They say woo now, but later, they say, I said woo. JD would say, it's about alcoholism, and I would say woo, but then later, I didn't say woo. Next morning there were few woos to be had. But when the woos were rich and full and growing on the woo tree, we would eat of their fruit and gently feed them to one another, in a small house on Southwood Plantation Road. (2015-04-02 - Mercy Lounge, Nashville)
[JD and crowd yell YEAH!!! at each other] This is a song about how, in our time of need, when the darkness is doing a sort of screen-shrink kind of deal and you picture your face in a decreasing amount of light, like the end credits of a movie, everything else right before, you in the middle, and the darkness all around, then you turn you head, and there's somebody else to your side, and you say, game shows touch our lives. (2015-04-04 - The Jinx, Savannah)
In the hours when comfort eludes us, on the days when we feel sure that the Most High has abandoned us, his or her mighty face from us, on those days, when the light cannot be found, you know because you looked for it. Not where it was. I left it right there. Someone took it! Where'd they put it? On the days when these questions awaken and torment us, game shows touch our lives. (2015-04-07 - Cat's Cradle, Carrboro)
[audience: SETLIST!!] My man. I could kiss you so hard. So bruised today, John Darnielle kissed me too hard. [plays guitar chord] In good times, in less good times, high water, and a low tide, in the fat years, in the leeeeeeeeean years, game shows touch our lives. (2015-04-13 - Union Transfer, Philadelphia)
Friends, I mean to tell you, we may come from different places, we may have walked different walks, seen different things, had experiences we can't always relate to one another in a way that's communicable, that may be a broad gulf between us, palpable at time, an enormous shape between the two of us. But there's one thing that's true of all of us: game shows touch our lives. (2015-04-16 - Bogart's, Cincinnati)
There's a Led Zeppelin song that goes 'Good times, bad times, you know I had my share.' Well, this song takes out all the other stuff that was confusing the narrator, the parts about the good times and the having your share. This song is about having more than your share, more than everyone else's share, bad times coming into your house and overflowing out onto your porch. Bad times. Bad times. Bad times! Game Shows Touch Our Lives! (2015-04-19)
People in the full light of day, or in the darkness of our living rooms, in private and in public, in good times and in bad times, in sickness and in health, for better and for worse, game shows touch our lives. (2015-06-02 - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco)
Keep smiling. Keep shining. Knowing I'll be on your side forever. That's what friends are for. (2015-06-03 - The Mayan, Los Angeles)
This song is about you, me, and a big TV. (2015-11-12)
This is a song about some alcoholic people. I always feel a little weird when people applaud that. Because I think, well, there's not much harder to deal with than alcoholism. There's a few things. For our heroes there isn't much. Well, that's who really would love to make their marriage work. It's important to them. It's important to them to make it happen. I am unclear as to why it's important to them. I suspect it has something to do with my own childhood issues. I don't know that persuasively, but at any rate. They have this idea that they must not get divorced, no matter how bad it gets. This is a song off Tallahassee about how bad it gets. (2017-06-01 The Fillmore)
This is a song about a couple who should have gotten a divorce a while back. But at some point it becomes a question of spite. Not only toward each other, but to you. Their friends, it's like, all of their friends know it's time for both people to move on into whatever sordid corner of their lives they go to next, but this chapter has seemed fetid for a long time. Seemed over and rotten already. And it's not entertaining, that's the idea. Which, when I think of it as a hilarious thing to pitch to 4AD, the storied English record label, and you go, what if it's about the decadent phase of a relationship. But that's what it's about. So. So they, they know their marriage is over, they take what's called in recovery a 'geographical'. [audience member: woo!] Woo! is exactly right. I one hundred percent whole heartedly support the Woo! for the geographical. Because, like, that seems reasonable to me - hey, if our addiction is causing us problems in southern California, who's to say it'll have the same hold in Tallahassee, Florida? (2019-05-07 Mr. Smalls Theatre)
When I think about- if you write the same characters for a long time, the thing you get to do is sort of believe in them. And have a kind of faith in them. Which you then have the luxurious horrible godlike power to have faith in them and then cause them to not live up to that faith. It's a masochistic activity, if you have those kinds of tendencies. This is one of the songs that makes me saddest, for my unnamed couple, who bottom-crawl across the country from Las Vegas to Tallahassee and then run out of fuel. (2021-09-09)
This is about a couple who need a divorce. (2022-05-11)

Live Performances

Footnotes

1. "they're playing our song" (2015-06-03, 2019-05-07)
2. "standing there smoking Newport Lights, smoking like a chimney" (2019-04-30), "standing there smoking Salem Lights" (2015-04-04, 2019-05-07), "smoking Newports" (2015-04-09), "smoking Carles" (2015-04-16), "standing there smoking Salem Lights, smoking like a chimney" (2015-04-13, 2015-04-17, 2015-06-02, 2015-06-03)
3. "everything, everything will be okay soon" (2015-04-02, 2015-04-09, 2015-04-16, 2019-05-07), "everything, everything's gonna be okay soon" (2015-04-17)
4. "filled with fabulous prizes, it's filled with them" (2019-05-07)
5. "with every living thing in me" (2015-04-02, 2015-04-07, 2015-04-16, 2015-04-17, 2015-06-03), "with every crawling thing in me" (2015-06-02)
6. "maybe tomorrow, not yet, maybe the next day" (2015-04-17)