Stories Don’t End (the song)
Gonna kick it off with a digression
Part 1 - the inspo
I’ve been accused of being a completionist. Anything that I fall in love with, any art that makes me feel like I found some lost remnant of my cosmic self that I didn’t know existed, it makes me want to devour everything by the artist that made it. It’s a fairly small club. Bowie, Dylan, Joni, Herbie, Pynchon, Delillo, Kurosawa, Bergman, Cronenberg. I’m sure there are some I’m forgetting. Right now it’s all the old Godzilla movies. I used to think it was a manifestation of some mild OCD that didn’t really start until my mid-20’s or so. But I was reminded by a life long friend that I did the same thing with Vonnegut novels when we were 15. It didn’t even occur to me. I guess it’s who I’ve always been.
As I type this I realize it might read as some kind of humblebrag, but at least at this current moment, I don’t think it’s a particularly great quality. I think it’s borne out of some kind of desperation rather than curiosity. Maybe I feel like I can hang on to and apply these artists’ wisdom/greatness to what I do if I can just stay in consultation with it. Or maybe it works like a drug addiction - I get an enormous high from my first contact with this their brains and then spend the next several weeks and months chasing that feeling through their other works. Sometimes I get a hit as strong as the first, sometimes stronger, but eventually it all feels assimilated and I need to move on. In any case, it makes for a very rich relationship with the artists that I care about. But it also makes for gigantic blind spots. It also stuffs me full of trivia about so much great artist’s lesser works. And I don’t know how valuable that is.
Anyway! In the spirit of using Substack to open myself up a bit more I decided I wanted to share all that. But I only brought it up to lead me to Joan Didion. Finding her books was probably my most aggressive bout of completionism. The first (and still my favorite) of her books that I read was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I’m clearly biased by my own experience, but it seems like the perfect place to start with her work. It’s a collection of essays which gave such direct insight into her worldview. I don’t want to slip too far into some kind of book review. Suffice it to say that I cherish all of her books deeply. I started reading them while writing Nothing Is Wrong and it carried into the writing of Stories Don’t End. I give her perspective so much of the credit for how songs like Most People or Something In Common were written. For those 2-3 years, I feel like I was speaking a language that she had taught me.
I could’ve sworn that the short sentence “Stories don’t end” was lifted directly from her novel Democracy. And I freely admitted it for years. But then one day, coming across that book on my shelf, I decided to find the exact spot the sentence appears. It’s a pretty short book so I was able to look page by page and I couldn’t find it! I even looked twice. It’s entirely possible I just missed it. But maybe it’s just not there. Which made me wonder what Joan Didion book it IS lifted from. Or if I actually did think it up on my own, but being in the throes of this obsessive episode, maybe I just assumed it was her line first? I may never know. But if there are any fellow completionists out there looking to get cracking with Didion, keep your eyes peeled for those three words and report back.
Part 2 - the recording
A lot of these demos are just fun to share as some kind of keepsake that I never thought anyone would hear. But I’m particularly proud to share this one with you. It’s how the song existed (and still exists to me) before it was blighted.
All due love and respect to the mighty Jacquire King. He was an incredible producer for us and I feel like I learned a great deal from him. But this is one song where our opinions diverged, I wanted to be a good sport so I followed his lead, and I’ve regretted it to this day. Let the record show there have been plenty of times that all of our producers including Jacquire have made producer sized suggestions that I disagreed with in the moment only to be wowed by their vision once the song was finished. So I don’t pretend to know what’s best for a tune. In fact, I’m often the last person I trust. But this is one moment I have yet to come around on.
Here’s what happened: if you listen to the demo below, you’ll hear a brief pre-chorus right after the first verse. It starts with the words “Like a famous singer…” It’s the same section (with different lyrics) that happen before the second chorus. Now check out the studio recording. The first pre-chorus is lopped off. Jacquire wanted to get to the chorus a little faster and this pre felt like too much of a departure too early; too much like a bridge. It irked me that the verse ended on the one chord and the chorus began on the one chord, but there were other songs that have done that so I agreed to the edit. And then I thought I’d come around but I never could. When our manager at the time initially suggested removing this song from the track list, my first thought was, “he wouldn’t be saying this if the pre-chorus wasn’t removed.” I’m certain that’s not true. I’m also pretty confident the song retains most if not all of its power in its final form. I just wanted to share all this to show how INSANE and lost in the weeds us writers can get sometimes.
So here is the original demo with the original (and better) structure.
(Love you Jacquire. You’re a legend 😘)