Anatomy Of A Song #15: I Could Try

There came to me this morning the faintest little tickle of discomfort as I finished my eight mile run and my first eightball. Not necessarily in that order.

What was it? It stood there on the precipice of my consciousness, swaying, waving its arms until it toppled into my tanned, athletic brain:

What of the Unfinished Series? What came of it? Was there ever a greater disgrace in all of blogdom?

Was it to be my Ishtar? A huge beacon of shame? A monument to ego and folly? Was it to be The Orchestra's Symphony Of Ignominy?

And then I was like- no, no- that's not what's up. If I were you I would actually arrived at the conclusion that th' song actually ended up kind of sucking and couldn't possibly live up to the hype surrounding its inception and recording. And so I buried it in a blizzard of the usual invective.

And I would have thought that I, Bobby Lightfoot, had stumbled. That's what I would have thought. And I rekkin' I'da thought that it would actually take a lot of stones to carry through and post the song. You'd have to be really confident in the thing and you'd have to have a totally bloated ego to splash your wank up there after a couple of weeks of glorious foreplay.

Yeah. Here's "I Could Try". But here's the thing- there isn't anything so Rimbaudian about the whole fuckin' thing. I really, really swear to god that it's because i just haven't been able to be bothered with horn sessions. I'm a fuckin' busy dude and I'm still stretched into horrible pretzel shapes by my hideous and debilitating sciatica. Motherfucker, it hurts. I did two Oxycodones yesterday and didn't know if I was going to puke or talk to god first.

So the only suspension of disbelief that I will require of my audience on this still work-in-progress is that they pretend that the awful, cheesy fake horns that I put as guides in the instrumental section are real, Alpert-esque and delicious. I would have taken them out for the rough mix but I was in a swoon or some crap.

So after very much ado indeed, I present at last the almost-done version of "I Could Try" in all its unashamedly sunny Ocean Way pre-ironic pop basket-weavery. And pave the way for the final version with th' trumpet section that I'll finish this very god damn summer.

For any of my more recent readers I refer you back to blog entries "????, ??, ????" through "????, ??, ????" for the painstaking studio diary I kept on all phases of the production of "I Could Try" and then abandoned like so much balled-up music paper on the stage floor.

It gives me great pleasure to present:

I Could Try

Walking along
Trying not to get it wrong
Trying to make it seem like
Something I do every day

Hoping that you feel the same
Hoping that it ain't the same old little game-
Boy meets girl and boy gets crucified

But I could try
To love you just a little
Let a touch go by the side
Because I'm older now
And I just can't take the ride...

And I could try
To give you just a piece of my heart
And let it slide...
Well, I ain't got much left inside
But I guess that I could try...

Take you to the show
Trying not to let you know
Listen to the radio
Like we did yesterday

That's when you take me down
That's when you say hey baby I'll see you 'round
But I can take it, man- I'm good that way...

But I could try
To love you just a little
Let a touch go by the side
Because I'm older now
And I just can't take the ride...

Ain't nobody ever too far gone, baby...