Tongue-Tied
This song, like most of my songs, was inspired from within… I was in a really weird place at the time I wrote this song and a slew of others that I will eventually post one day. For the first time in my life I found myself without a solid, well-defined direction. I had graduated, but I had no job lined up. I had a degree, but I was unsure if I was “right” for the career field. In fact, I was unsure about most everything at that point. All I knew was that I had a guitar, I had a pen, I had a notebook, and I had a great deal of issues on my mind. To alleviate some of that stress, I took to writing.
There were many different things that I wanted to do within the upcoming year… 2011 had just started, and 2010 was pretty much the greatest year of my life. Graduating college was the major goal in my life for years, and when I did, I really had to re-evaluate my surroundings and figure out what life was like without tests and grades. So I took some time off from the eventual job hunt, and just relaxed. It was pretty nice the first month, the second month was good, third month was cool… But then, I became pretty overwhelmed with the imminent closing of this chapter in my life. In the first few months, I had written about 8 songs. I was feeling pretty good. But from about September to when I finished this song and “Without You,” I hadn’t written a single thing- Barely even getting a line down on paper or a chord to strum on the guitar.
By the time I had recorded this song and “Without You,” I was getting ready to start working- Using the degree after all of that time worrying about it. I had also made some pretty ridiculously stressful, time-defying goals for myself. When you decide to buy a house, with no money, before you even start your first “real” job, at the age of 22… It seems like you’ve got your head in the clouds. Well, I’ve always liked the clouds. It all worked out in the end… And I did buy that house.
This song started as a simple note-to-note melody that I formed the chords around. Sometimes, I get lucky and the melody just falls into the chords that I improv, and other times, I build the chords based on the melody. I was really trying to learn and use more theory to support the times when I’m not so lucky with songwriting. This song had a mixture, but I was very happy with the way it turned out. The bridge/refrain is my favorite part of the song, and holds a lot of meaning to me. The verses are at face value about not being able to write a story/song for the longest time. However, my real inspiration was the fact that for 8 months I was struggling with not being able to write my own story in my own life for what seemed like an eternity.
I hope you enjoy this song as much as I enjoyed lifting this weight off my shoulders. Thanks for listening.
Tommy
