Four Walls

Robert James

“Four Walls” is the oldest song of the bunch. It was written early in 1992. I had been working with a drummer friend of mine for a while during the Fall 1991 semester. We’d get together once every few weeks and write and record to 4-track one or two songs. I was having a blast doing this. They were the best songs I had written to that point… possibly still to this day. Things changed though. The drummer joined a full time band and didn’t have time to for our little songwriting exercises, and then my guitar was stolen and I was out of commission for a while. Once I got a new guitar I tried carrying on by myself for a while, playing my brother’s drums. The quality of the songs (and the drumming… ouch) went down, but occasionally I’d pull out a good one. In the years that followed I tried starting a few different bands with a bass player friend of mine and a parade of different drummers. This song was played by all of them. Only one of those bands actually played a gig, my brother was the singer in that band but 2 or 3 days before the gig the drummer quit and my brother switched to drums while I handled the vocals, and this song was in the set. Around 1997 it fell out of favor, but in 2003 I brought it out of storage for the band Break Even and it was eventually recorded for the band’s second CD.