dark for ages

Lyrics
It’s been dark for ages and I see you in the glow
Of the tuner on my quiet radio
You are so exciting when you tell me with your eyes
What you could have said with half a dozen sighs
It’s been dark for ages and it’s been a lot of fun
To be with you when the working day is done
Humming silken love songs and believing that they’re true
It’s so easy to believe when I’m with you

When the light has been extinguished and the blanket is pulled down
And our laughter fills our night time to replace our daytime frown
I can gather reassurance from the trust in your embrace
And I trace the simple beauty in your softly smiling face
Well I hope its dark for ages while we give our dreams a chase

It’s been dark for ages and we’ve barely had the time
To accommodate your reason to my rhyme
We know there’s tomorrow and we have to get our sleep
But the only promise made we never keep
It’s been dark for ages but I see the curtain shine
And reflect upon an empty glass of wine
I can’t see the clock from here but I know there’s a day
That lies waiting for the two of us to say
"It’s been dark for ages," but the morning melts the precious dark away

Click here to hear the song:  Dark For Ages

Notes by the Author:

This is the first song, and in fact to date the only song, I wrote to be finger-picked.  I’d never been taught finger-picking, and the 12-string guitar made it awkward to learn on my own.  But by the time I was a sophomore in college, when I wrote this song, I’d learned a few songs in that style, including the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Cat Stevens’ “How Can I Tell You,” and was gaining confidence with that technique.

I was dating a woman named Stephanie, but the relationship was troubled because she was REALLY dating a guy who lived across the hall from me.  In a way, we were having an affair, although no one involved was married.  But it was a very uncomfortable situation for me.  I felt terrible for Neil’s sake, but I really adored Stephanie.

She had gone (with Neil, I think) to see an animation festival one night, and came to my room later.  One of the cartoons had included brief snippets of history, and for the Dark Ages the cartoon had people’s voices on a black screen saying “It’s been dark for ages.”  I never saw the cartoon, but Steph found it hilarious.  The phrase stuck in my ears, mostly because I heard it from her.

We used to lay in bed for hours while my radio was tuned to a soft rock station.  It was a very lazy romance.  We’d stay up most of the night talking.  I wrote this song in the spring, after we’d been together (more or less) for a few months.  It’s the only song I wrote from that relationship, I think, but it’s among the best I’ve ever written.  My friends were very surprised by this song because it’s about being in bed with a woman.  Most of my songs seem ignorant of sex, or sarcastic about it.  This is not only a romantic song, but enthusiastic about the physical familiarity of love.  That was the intention.  Every word of this song is true.

This recording features lots of wonderful nuances that Jon added from his new keyboard.  It’s picked on the Martin.  By the time we recorded this I hadn’t practiced fingerpicking much and I think I’m a little rusty.  It took A LOT of tries before we got even this version recorded.  While the Martin is superior to the Epiphone in most respects, in one way it’s not:  the strings on the Epiphone were much closer together, on a narrow neck that felt more like a 6-string.  That made the transition to finger-picking much easier on the Epiphone than it is on the Martin.

Jon and I have an earlier recording of this song that we never put on our CDs.  I think the guitar work is better on that one, but it doesn’t have the wonderful percussive pops and other acoustic tricks that appear on this one, so overall this is a better recording.

Notes by the Other Guy:

Unequivocally, unalterably, unabashedly, I proclaim this to be the best piece of music produced in the 20th century.  It is, really, just a guy picking a guitar and singing, but it really is interesting.  It goes on for over 4 minutes and never gets dull.  It proves that less is more, which I admit only begrudgingly.  It is honest and heartfelt and phantamous and inhabiting.   The images are awesome; the tuner on the radio, the clock, the silken love songs.   Perhaps the intrepid reader has lost my point in the subtelty of expression:   I really like this song.

We recorded it by using a really simple, really loud rock beat as sort of a metronome to pace Bill with the intention of mixing it out of the final version.  I made a vague reference to using the Juno-60 to add "effects" keyboard sounds.  It was an offer that notably terrified Bill, who made me swear a blood oath on my unborn children that I would never do any such thing.   He had some crazed thought about me adding percussion to the background and insisted it would sound good.  I had no idea how it would sound, but at any rate the suggestion was immaterial to me since I was completely incapable of doing anything like what Bill had described.  After getting him to concede to the introductory reverse-cymbal sound and the applause at the end, I eventually replaced the metronome-drum beat with something the drum machine called a "new age beat," which was might be something but isn't a "beat."  The ultimate result was that the new drum maching sound ended up being the sort of background percussion Bill had asked for, and I was amazed at how right he was about the precussion being exactly what the song needed.  My favorite part of this song is the applause at the end.