The Hot Garden Stomp
Lyrics
The room was unbearably hot
Flowering plant that hung from the radiator pipe
It was dripping sweat from its rapidly fading petals
And to the humming world in which I was living
A crescendoing stepping sound came in
I heard you stepping over three weeks' worth of newspapers
Piled up outside the door
I hear you knocking
Come in
Turn on the radio
Turn up the volume
You sat down in the same place where you used to sit
It brought back a memory or two
I may not know much any more, but I remember you
You were quiet for a while and that was nice
Then you came along with your questions, always questions
I don't have any answers to those particular questions
I hear you talking
Shut up
Turn on the radio
Turn up the volume
Banter
- It's of the genre I call 'tortured emo dude song', right. Like, I wrote my fair share of them and I really was into them at the time. And then one day I got a letter from somebody calling me out. I will forever be grateful for this letter, because it pointed out that I had the tortured emo dude who blames all of his problems on the absence of a woman who, you know, could fix his life by coming and just sort of standing there in the radiant sheen of his self-effulgent narcissistic light. Uh, I thought, feminist writer from Missouri, you are right, and I'm not going to have that dude in my songs anymore, 'cause he's kind of an entertaining dude to contemplate when you're seventeen, but if you're twenty-one and you're still doing the sort of thing where it's like, 'my life would be better if a nameless faceless woman would come and fix it,' son, then you need to grow out of that, because that's not even what it's all about. But that said, those songs are not without their occasional charms. (2011-06-26)
Live Performances