This is a dark ride...

As promised, here is the first of hopefully several posts about the origins of some of our original songs.  What better way to get the ball rolling than with my personal favorite (and, in my opinion, the most emotionally powerful)?  Possibly more than any of the other songs going on our debut album These Two Shall Pass, "Airport in Amsterdam" captures the story I'm trying to tell.  There's a lot in that song, and it may not be as obvious upon the first listen as to what exactly it's about.

I'd like to start by sharing a little insight into one of the lines that the whole song was built around.  When I was a kid, NBC began airing The John Larroquette show.  I was only 13 at the time and, even though I couldn't relate directly to anything on the show, I remember what a strange draw I felt to the story.  Maybe it was a weird kind of empathy.  But the sitcom (if you could necessarily call it that) about a struggling alcoholic, of all things, somehow appealed to me on some primal level, even in my squeakier-than-squeaky-clean teenage years.  Early on in the show, the main character tells the story of the secondhand wooden carnival ride sign hanging on his office wall that reminds him of his constant, everyday struggle.  The sign just said "This Is a Dark Ride".

To this day, I couldn't tell you why I kept a mental image of that sign in my head for almost twenty years.  Of all  the shots caught on film that I've seen in my years of devouring pop culture and media, that's one that sticks with me in an almost haunting way.  And seventeen years later it found its way into what I consider my best songwriting achievement to this point as the first line of the chorus.  But it wasn't such a simple process to get there.

These Two Shall Pass is really the story of two failed relationships I had in my late twenties that, taken separately, shouldn't have left me in very bad shape.  But, of course, in our youth we make mistakes that we shouldn't make, and I made the mistake of moving on to the second before I was over the first.  The first relationship ended with a broken engagement.  The second, in all fairness, probably had no right to end up as even a blip on the radar for me or the woman involved.  It ended with a simple phone call as I was on my way to the DFW airport for an eight-day business trip to Norway.  I was fine when I got on the plane, but after a sleepless night over the Atlantic I wasn't exactly in my right mind when we touched down in Amsterdam.

I spent the 2-hour layover trying to convince my coworker and friend that, while I was slightly down for the count, everything was working out for the best.  It's a little fuzzy in my memory now because I know I was very tired, but I'm pretty sure that he was sick of hearing me talk about it because, knowing me, I was probably saying the same thing over and over without making much sense.  Most likely I was stuck in some sort of awkward stages-of-grief loop.  So he was surely as relieved as I was when we boarded our plane for the short flight to Oslo with seats in separate rows.  It was time to stop running my mouth.

I didn't sleep much for that week in Oslo - the subject of my other song "Gray City".  I also didn't talk about my breakup anymore.  I spent a lot of time sitting on the roof of the Oslo Opera House, day and night.  The time difference means that Norway is several hours ahead of Texas, and I remember sitting on top of the Opera House, looking out at the sunset over the water, and thinking about how it was getting dark where I was, while the daylight seemed to be fleeing in the direction of all those I loved, including the blown-out-of-proportion blip back home.  Hence the next lines of the chorus: "Watching the light that was mine, passing on through, leaving me for you."

What I really did throughout that trip was bottle everything up inside.  I don't know if that was responsible for what happened next, but it couldn't have helped.  What happened next was that I projected everything I had been feeling from my failed engagement from over a year before onto the current situation and I began to treat this minor setback as simply a continuation of that old failure.  Of course, this led to the artistic license I took in using the imagery of the broken engagement to describe the situation in the song.  As crazy as it was, at the time these two events were practically one and the same for me.

You really see a lot of mistakes in hindsight, and this ended up being a costly one.  It sent me into what I'll always remember as one of the darkest times in my life.  The image of that carnival sign hanging in that bleak office came back to me, and when I began to write "Airport in Amsterdam" over a year and a half later it was the phrase on that sign that molded the song.  And the song practically wrote itself.  I played parts of the song for friends before it came completely together.  No one seemed all that enthused.  One aspect that I think may have thrown people off was the fact that the chorus doesn't end on tonic - it just kind of drops out.  But I did that on purpose when I realized that was how the song was supposed to feel.  There's no line that can follow "When it goes, it darkens the coast."  That's the part where the whole song goes dark.

Although initial reactions during the songwriting process (this was one of the first songs I ever wrote and it came to life over a period of two to three weeks) weren't all that great, I decided to give it a shot anyway.  The first time I played the song in its entirety was at a Thursday Open Mic at the Purple Pig, and I was a little emotionally wrecked when the whole place got quiet after I played it.  But ever since then there's been so shortage of reactions.  It is a dark song for a dark ride.  But, like I've said before, sometimes those dark rides lead you to a light at the end of the tunnel.