Click here to hear the song: expecting you never
Notes by the Author:
I wrote this my senior year in high school. Much like "Blue is Not Your Color," I was playing around with different chord formations high on the fretboard. The chord that rings through the verses here is an E5, technically not a chord at all since it has only two notes, E and B. Played on the 7th fret, in a formation I’d been using for Gordon Lightfoot’s "Sundown," it has a wonderful rich, haunting sound to it. I found it hypnotic, especially played in this 3/4 time, at this tempo. Before attaching it to this lyric, I would sometimes mess around with this chord progression for long stretches, improvising and weaving around in this key.When I wrote these words, I was, uh, between girlfriends. I was writing an anguished teen lament to some ideal girl who would, at least, tolerate me. But my essential pessimism about such things is obvious in this lyric, and it is thus obvious why such a song was necessary in the first place.
The guitar harmonics that ring throughout were always in my imagination for an arrangement of this song, but of course I could never play them while playing the chords, and until Mary’s Garage Band recorded it I could only imagine what they’d sound like together. I was very pleased with the result.
Notes by Jon:
This is one of only 2 songs we have written in ¾ time. This is due largely to the fact that our drum machine only plays 4/4 time unless I really do a lot of re-programming. We didn’t figure it out until our 3rd try at making Bill play it to a 4/4 beat. Adding Dan to the group made all the difference on this one. It also has a 5th chord, which I had never seen before. It gave me a lot of freedom to play around with a lead keyboard sound in the background. I REALLY like this song. It has the best of Bill’s acoustic sounds, a raw edge to it, lyrics that explore well Bill’s oh-so-common theme of un-returned love interest, and a good fake ending just before the last verse.