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
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

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

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 thie rmarriage 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)

Live Performances

Footnotes

1. "they're playing our song" (2019-05-07) 2. "standing there smoking Newport Lights, smoking like a chimney" (2019-04-30), "standing there smoking Salem Lights" (2019-05-07) 3. "everything, everything will be okay soon" (2019-05-07) 4. "filled with fabulous prizes, it's filled with them" (2019-05-07)