I wrote this song on the way home from a dental appointment. I was there for a filling, not my first and almost certainly not my last. I loathe the dentist office, but over the years I've managed to largely surpress everything but the tip of that iceberg.
Singing while numb is an idea that I always liked, but I had never gotten around to recording it before. The idea of hauling out my equipment just to set it up and record bad singing was never all that appealing, but in February I had my gear set up in the dining room nearly 24/7, so there was no real impediment. I had the song—what there is of it—written in the ten minute walk between the office and my apartment, and sat down and recorded it without rehearsing as soon as I got back. And that recording, unmolested, is what's on the album: a light-hearted snapshot of an addled moment in time.
I could argue a metaphor here, present the song as a masked discussion of the way we tend to view the bad events in our lives on a sort of qualitative continuum—sure, this is bad, but it's not as bad as that was, remember that?—as a means of coping with the uglier troughs in our emotional graphs. Or as a vamp on the will to medicate, or simply withdraw, when we can't see a way to fundamentally resist the negative situation itself. Or, or, or: there's a lot that could be read into it, if you're inclined, but to suggest that I intended any such thing when I wrote and recorded it would be wildly, embarassingly dishonest. It's a silly song about novocaine. Full stop.