At the beginning of the month, my girlfriend Jessica moved into my apartment. This is the culmination of many months of her partially living at my apartment. A lot of this arrangement is purely pragmatic – since she was spending 3-4 nights a week at my place anyway, it made enough sense for her to just fill in that gap. Also, we’ve put in enough time and effort and gone through enough bumps and bruises that a lot of the anxieties I had about sharing space with her have been addressed. There were fewer and fewer reasons not to try living together, and a lot of reasons why we both felt it would be a great idea (to her credit, she arrived at that conclusion months before I did). Plus a lot of her stuff is nicer than mine.
Jessica works nights, meaning that about half of the week she sleeps during the day. Over the past few months, there were a number of instances where she would sleep at my place during the day (I live in a really quiet neighbourhood – for a while she lived across the street from a train yard) and then have to take off for work or errands. On days when I thought it was likely she’d be there, I tried to get into the habit of making the bed (which is a habit I picked up from her – I hardly ever do it when it’s just me). Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I’d come home from work to find the bed unmade because she’d been sleeping in it – a circumstance that always made me smile. I liked that she felt comfortable and at home at my place.
I’ve never lived with someone before. My last girlfriend and I had talked about it a few times, but she was far more hesitant about the idea than I was (which, in retrospect, is certainly to the credit of her foresight). I’ve lived alone for 6 or 7 years now, and the idea of living in a place that is as much someone else’s as it is mine is a pretty scary one. Perhaps more than average, I feel the need for lots of personal space. What does “personal space” mean when you’re living in a home with someone else (much less a one-bedroom apartment)? How do you navigate those things? What happens when the need for personal space conflicts with another person’s need for support? What happens if the relationship falls apart?
Lots of scary questions.
But a lot of the fear, for me at least, gets taken away when I think of how things have gone so far. And yeah, I don’t know what’s going to happen with us down the road – nobody does. But having her around makes a lot more sense to me than not having her around, and if/when those problems arise we’ll find a way to address them together as we have with other issues we’ve dealt with. For now, that’s enough.
This song is about that:
The song is designed to be playable live. Even though there is no viola (a rarity for my songs), the live performance will involve the viola. As a result, because my act is meant to feature the looping function of my pedal, the song is written with a single chord progression (F, C, E, Am). I stole a lot of the production ideas from one of my favourite City and Colour songs – minimal percussion, a reliance on the sound of the acoustic guitar, a vocal chorale to add some substance – all ideas lifted directly from that song. There’s an element of country music in this tune as well – an influence that I attribute to a local musician named Jack Mercer whose band I play fiddle for. There’s also the influence of R&B ballads that was centrally important on another one of my songs. Because it’s me, I couldn’t resist the urge to put in a wailing guitar solo in the middle – you can take the man out of the rock music…
I am very happy with the guitar sound I got. I achieved it by playing the guitar slightly more delicately than I usually do, and dual-track recording it with both the direct input and an external microphone. This allowed me to preserve the ‘clean’ and ‘sparkly’ quality of the live sound without losing the substance and frequency diversity of the ‘plugged in’ sound. The bass is simply the plucked strings of my viola, run through an octave filter and lightly EQed. Originally, I had thought to include a lot more viola on this song, but there were a couple of reasons I didn’t. First, I wanted to keep the ‘minimalist’ feel, and a full string quartet undermines that. Second, Jessica was in bed during a lot of the recording process and I didn’t want to disturb her.
I want to thank all the folks who gave me production feedback – I am learning to do this through trial & error, so outside suggestions are incredibly helpful. I’ve also created a “radio edit” version, since the full version of the song runs pretty long.
Lyrics
I can’t see the future.
There’s nothing but glass in my crystal ball.
And if you’d have asked, I’d have told you I’d passed
On my last chance to fall in love
I’m on this road for the first time
And there’s no prints on the path I’ve been shown
I don’t know where I’m going
But thanks to you I won’t get there alone
‘Cause I know that this much is true:
I want to come home to a bed that’s been unmade by you
And I don’t have a plan, but I’m not scared.
Let’s work backwards from there.
No-one knows what’ll happen tomorrow
There’s no way to tell by looking at the stars.
But I fell for you. I’m still falling.
And I’m happy to land wherever you are.
Maybe someday you’ll say you’re going away;
Maybe I’ll be the one through the door.
But until that time it’s just your heart and mine,
And I don’t think we need any more.
‘Cause I know that this much is true:
I want to come home to a bed that’s been unmade by you
And I don’t have a plan, but I’m not scared.
Let’s work backwards from there.
‘Cause if we know where we are, and we know where we want to be,
We’ll get there, my love, just as long as you stay with me.
There’s a part of my heart that I want you to share.
Let’s work backwards from there.
Crommunist 
This is the way I think it’s supposed to work. Just like you slowly realize how much sense it makes to live together because you practically already are, you’ll slowly require less and less personal space. Likewise, you both will slowly realize how dependent you’ve both become on each other (it can be so much easier to have a full time partner in your life) and the uncomfortable feelings of the unknown will fade.
This is exactly how it happened with my wife and I (together 20 years now), and I would say with the majority of our friends. You’re doing it right. It’s a very exciting time! I envy you a little. Congratulations.