Smaller & Smaller: Songwriter’s Notes
Louise and I enjoy redecorating Airbnbs that we stay in. Maybe redecorating is too strong of a word, but we like leaving a little something behind, making the space we occupied a little bit brighter for our presence there. Sometimes this just means we leave a plastic toy on a mantle, or we buy something the kitchen needed. Occasionally we go a bit further. We started this pretty early in our relationship. We were traveling in Armenia and staying at a particularly soul-less 6th floor walk-up in Yerevan. I think the man who rented it to us was named “Gor”. Above the sofa in the living room Gor had thoughtfully left a picture frame, which thoughtfully still contained the stock photography that the frame had been purchased with. We didn’t have much in the way of prints, and neither Lou or I can really draw, so we decided to do a little collage art to brighten up Gor’s place.
In 2018, we were staying in a really funky apartment in Cusco, Peru (Machu Pichu is fine, the trail there is better, avoid Aguas Caliente at all costs), we chewed Coca Tea in the mornings and took worried showers underneath an electric instant-on water heater with wiring we did not trust. I think the water in Cusco only runs at certain times of the day. The bed was lousy, there were mannequins and shopping carts in the apartment; I believe our hostess had flights of artistic fancy. There was a record player and some old records, and I at some point decided we should make the place a specially crafted little vinyl art-piece. I scrawled out the words, thinking about the literal act of writing in a circle on the record, running out of space with still more to say: “I wanted to leave something behind to ensure my time here was not forgotten but the words got smaller and smaller until I began to wonder if I was really here at all.” I think “until I began to wonder if I was really here at all” is just some vaguely artistic nonsense I threw in there to sound cool.
Then we had to find the silver pen to make the record. We wandered all over the commercial center of Cusco, passing by lots of places with bright neon signs offering discount prenatal care, asking in each Stationary store for a “boligrafo platano”. Everyone shook their head no, they had no platano pen, and maybe some of them looked at us a little sideways. This qualifies as the cloying, humorous anecdote part of this story, as what we were asking for was a “banana pen”, and what we wanted to say was a “boligrafo plato”. Oh, we had a good laugh about that one with the shop clerk. Louise, with impeccable penmanship, wrote the words in a lovely font and we left the record behind on the wall in Cusco. I doubt the Airbnb host even noticed.
Sometime later, I decided to set the words to music. Couldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes or so. I’m sure I thought of it as a complete, goof, a song that repeats 4 times, gets faster and faster, has fewer than 20 lyrics. But the piece somehow took on a little more meaning than I had originally intended, and now I see it as a metaphor for the futility of trying to create something meaningful in the fleeting and impermanent world, always changing, always fucking with our secret desire to live forever.