Notebook : pages 25-26

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This is the song about songwriting: The Human Condition. I think that's the shortest title of any song on the album, which is maybe a fitting bit of humility and restraint for a song that, when you get down to it, is a complaint about not having enough to justifiably complain about but complaining anyway. That sort of omphaloskepsis demands penance.

I wrote it down in D, and recorded it in same. I learned to play music on the piano, as a kid; it wasn't until I was fourteen that I started playing guitar. And so it was a revelation to discover that, while the same song in different keys on the piano still felt like the same song just a bit higher or lower, different keys on the guitar had very different feels. The sounds of various open chords—a G or a C or an E or a D—vary a great deal, because the practical need to build chords on six strings with less than six fingers often forces the guitarists hand in how a chord is built—selection of what are called inversions in music theory, for example.

So the key of D major on a guitar has a specific feel that makes me think of songs like, well, The Human Condition. The D itself is a very bright chord, and an open G has this great ringing feel to it and a root note much lower in a typical fretting than the D, so you get this wonderful sort of warm high...low...high feel when you go between the two, as the song does during the verses.

Other music jargon, for the uninitiated: "(simile)" in a musical context is shorthand for, more or less, "and so on in that fashion". I was being efficient (lazy?) here, not parenthetically declaring the need for a literary simile—and, in fact, I think there aren't any in the song, only metaphors. (If I've got my high school English lingo correct, at least.)

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