Always Gotta Have An Edge To It
By Cosmic Cairns on June 24, 2020 8:25 pm
Happy Half-way point! Let's do everything we just did all over again!
Back when I was in high school I was involved with a local kid's theater group and one of the leaders/instructors was a guy named J. J was the first person I'd ever met in real life who wrote his own songs and they were good songs! I can still sing a bunch of them now. He had me come in and lay down some violin and I think cello parts on a couple of his songs back in the day, which was kind of my first taste of collaborating on creating a song. He definitely had a vision of what he wanted, but he was open to my input and I seem to recall he even used a lyric I suggested in addition to letting me help craft the string arrangements. He also owned a 4-track cassette recorder, which was like the awesomest thing I'd ever seen in my life at the time. I ended up getting one myself a couple years later when I was in college, which was when I really started to create music of my own. One of the things I got really interested in with the 4-track was the various ways you could manipulate sound with it. You could mess with the tape speed, do extreme panning back and forth, make backwards noises by flipping the tape over to the other side, make the volume cut in and out abruptly, and various other stuff. When I also got my first guitar effects pedal, all bets were off. I got super into making weird noises, but also trying to merge them with, like, actual songs.
So I remember coming home for like a Christmas or summer vacation and I was excited to show J some of the music I'd created. Now J was very much a meat and potatoes acoustic guitar singer-songwriter type of guy. I remember having a conversation with him about the Beatles one time. He liked Abbey Road pretty well, but he wasn't so big on Revolver because he thought it had too much experimental nonsense on it. So in retrospect, I'm not sure what I was thinking showing him some of my more, shall we say, avant-garde recordings. I guess it was just my youthful enthusiasm. To be fair, I think I tried to pick ones that also had some kind of song structure and melody, but I never could seem to resist including some weird noises or something. At any rate, I made him sit through a song or two and was like, "Well? What do you think?" He kind of got this glazed look in his eyes and shook his head and said "Always gotta have an edge to it" and just sort of wandered away.
I realized that wasn't exactly intended as a compliment, but I recognized the truth to it and sort of chose to take it as a badge of honor. To a large extent, I still follow this philosophy today. I still like merging weird noises with actual songs, which is exactly what I tried to do on this song. For that reason, J probably wouldn't like this song. But I'm dedicating it to him anyway. He passed away a few years ago, but he was definitely a huge inspiration to me, especially in my early days of making music. I'm not entirely sure I'd be doing this now if I hadn't met him.
I tried to make the lyrics a little bit of a conversation/debate about the pros and cons of making "edgy" music. Are noise and abstract lyrics something to hide behind? Or do they sometimes enrich the song and make it more interesting? All I know is it was super fun putting together all the weird noises on this track, so that's one point in favor of the edge argument. 
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You say you want to play things straight
Get to the truthful bits
But then you sabotage yourself
Cause it's always gotta have an edge to it
It's like you need to hide behind
A wall of noise and grit
A shield to protect your heart
When it's always gotta have an edge to it
But sometimes edges can serve their use
Sometimes speaking bluntly lands you in jail
There's times when things are richer when you're not straight-forward
At times it's better speaking through a veil
I hear the point you're trying to make
Sometimes the facts don't fit
I know it's hard to look a fool
So it's always gotta have an edge to it
But there's a time for everything
So come and have a sit
Sometimes it should be silky smooth
And sometimes you ought to put an edge on it
I just like seeing what happens when
Things get pushed out to the edge
There's times I prefer staying on the couch
Sometimes I want to sit on a ledge
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)