Tell Me Lies

 

 

By 1999 things just looked bleak and hollow. I was becoming a crushed person and all that is left then is your resolve and love for a child. I was just not prepared to help anything financially and for the first time really understood how important money could really be. I was fighting all my battles alone without any support and I was losing credibility everywhere. I was hanging on to jobs but losing people that had been close to me for years previous.  

 

At the same time my dear friend Chantal Aston was going through simular emotions having been profoundly hurt and not for the first time. I had been playing with the melody for some time but decided I had something when a waiter at Circo asked me what the name of that piece was. I didn't know yet.

 

Then I fell in love with a stunning portuguese woman. For a moment there I thought that maybe that's a sign that God is always with you at you worst moments of despair. Miss M. was a willing participant at at one point we may have been working five jobs between us, if you count gigs that way. I still had a piano to earn from Circo and close to getting a free apartment for the remaining year since I was contributing to business after all. I was also filling my days as a corporate head-hunter. I found it tedious although I was was just glad I had a sales job that paid something every week guaranteed, I just didn't like it. The whole office came to Circo one night to razz me and my piano skills and here I am surrounded by nothing except people I work for including the people I work for. Circo was my anchor at that time and I used it as a floatation device also.   

 

When I started drinking again it was February of 1999, it seems that the last act of this play ends with this song and somehow its still my favorite. i was in the studio buggin' the cats during the recording of it but that's  the artist in me and also an egomaniacal need to be in some kind of small control over the last chance to record something that may last forever. 

 

Bernie Senesky plays incredible piano and has for a couple generations by now, Archie Allyene on drums and Duncan Hopkins on bass. Excellent company. This was also a time when I realized what level my piano chops had to be on to really matter. These thoughts and many more ran through my mind. It was depressing and it slowly blossomed into a depression.

 

I think I bumped into her on the subway when she told me she was going to record and I pitched her the idea of doing one of my songs even though this is the only one I could picture in my mind with her vocals, even if everything rhymes with "oo".