Notebook : pages 27-28

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The rest of The Human Condition. It went on to the record pretty much as written, though the second, bouncy part of the second verse on the right got tightened up a little bit from that first rough-idea draft. I actually changed the final line to ditto the first verse more closely: "we've got a good life".

It's funny, given the girl songs on this record and the others I've written over the years, but I don't write many songs about my wife. The first song I ever wrote for her, Song For You, covers the fact that, well, I usually write songs about things that piss me off or drive me batshit, and none of that applies. The original words are spot on: I'm lucky every day to have such a good wife. We're both lucky; things are good, and even the occasional disagreements we have are such small stuff, so petty in comparison to the happiness and comfort we get from being together.

But there's also a sense of the privacy of our relationship—I walk a line between writing about her and us and not wanting to make that a highly visible sort of broadcast communication without her really having any say in the matter. I'm both inclined out of songwriter compulsion to document my thoughts and feelings, and moved out of respect for that sense of internalness and privacy to not put her in the spotlight as punishment for having fallen for a songwriter.