Please Don’t Cry Me a River

Robert James

How’s that for some word salad, eh? Throw a little Italian dressing on this one and you’ve got yourself a healthy meal!

I’ve been trying to challenge myself vocally with more complicated melodies and lots of lyrics and things like that, even though I don’t consider myself a singer, or a lyricist, or anything that has anything remotely to do with vocals. It’s interesting as a Covid-19 quarantine experiment, you know?

Given all of that, I still don’t know what the hell I was thinking with this one. I knew it was going to be too difficult to sing each verse without punching, and I did end up splitting the verses into two four bar phrases and recording them separately, but it was still murder. Literally. You can actually hear me die of asphyxiation as I was trying to sing the last line of the first verse. On the word “undone” I literally died, fell over, landed on my hands and somehow gave myself CPR and came back to life. Okay… maybe not literally.

Structurally it’s a little odd too. There is no chorus. It’s just an A section that repeats a few times (I called it a verse but it’s really not a verse) with a break in the middle that I called a chorus but it really wasn’t a chorus. The song as a whole is pretty short. I can’t remember what was going on when I sketched the form out, but I wonder if I was in a rush for some reason. I don’t remember.

The guitars are all Gibson ES-335 and the amps are all Fender Bassbreaker 15 and Vox AC15. The rhythm guitar used an Ibanez Tube Screamer Mini, and the leads used a Klon KTR and a Malaise Forever Black Lives Matter.

Chorus
Its just how it has to be right now
just hang in there forever

I don’t want to make a thing of this
please don’t cry me a river

Verse 1
what if a situation called for something like a peaceful ending but itstead it just got worse
just try to picture everyone you care about is watching closely as it all comes undone

Verse 2
and if you’re questioning the right from wrong only to then discover that there’s really no such thing
it leaves you guessing as to where to go from here and can you find your way without directions