IKEA & Emeril
Where else to start a 25th anniversary album but with a big shot of nostalgia…

The backdrop to so many of our early days as a married couple featured IKEA furniture.  Bookcases, TV stands, end tables, chairs, and artwork in a color palette of laminate beech wood, white, and sky blue.  I remember being so proud loading up the car with the billy bookcase boxes and the pain in the butt it was to get that gray pommel horse of a bench/foot stand to fit next to them.  Not to mention that huge piece of blue artwork (a print of Joan Miro’s Bleu II, but we didn’t know that at the time).

So much of that time period is a blur.  Long work days.  Hours and hours in traffic.  9/11.  But I have vivid memories of our early evenings propped up in bed watching Emiril Live on TV.  It’s funny considering our idea of a good dinner was the mall food court across the street or maybe that Chili’s up on Highway 7 and half the ingredients Emeril used we’d never even heard of at the time, but the food looked good and that’s all that really mattered to us back then.

Those thoughts were roaming around in my mind as I wrote these lyrics and I imagined all our go get’em slaps and all that time spent assembling furniture… and our lives together.

This song makes me laugh a couple of times.  Once when I insist on describing the old loveseat as olive green even though you (correctly) say it was more of a taupe color.  The second time is in the outro when I cut the last ‘s’ off of a$$ like I hadn’t already used the word once.  As always, it’s dumb stuff that makes me chuckle.

Last note on this one.  I actually started writing this with a lyric in my head that went something like: “all the crooked lines and scribbled shades in marker landscapes of cows in green grass and brown hay”.  Sounds like a line in a really bad Adam Sandler movie.

Dreamboat
You used to always tell me to stop talking bad about your husband when I engaged in negative self-talk, but most of the time, I wasn’t being truly negative, I was making an honest assessment of myself, my shortcomings, and where I fit.  Standing next to you, it’s always been obvious to me that I’m playing the supporting role to your top billing.  I’m not saying I’m bad - I’m at least in the same movie - but you’ll always be the star that everyone gravitates towards.  I’ve never understood what you saw/see in me, but I’m forever grateful.  And whatever it is that you do see, I’ll always give everything I can to make that part of me shine as bright as humanly possible.

Jealous
The song takes place in two scenes, both at the Meadowlands duplex.  

The first scene is a late-afternoon / early evening get together in late summer.  You walked in through the garage, down that long hallway, and gave me a hug.  The first one you ever gave me.  I didn’t expect the hug in the first place, but even more so, I didn’t expect it to linger and linger in my head afterwards like it did.

The second scene was in winter later that year.  I don’t remember the details of where you were coming from or why, but it was snowing pretty heavy and you were traveling back with your mom and needed a place to stay for the evening so she could head back home.  Opening that door, and seeing you standing there caused the same lightning bolt to shoot through me as that hug many months before.

Combine those two scenes, with one crazy bitch, some fake apple juice, and spaghetti straps, and you get this song.  

Up with Me
This song takes a light approach at a dark topic: my drinking and what the ramifications could have been if I wouldn’t have had your endless support once I finally went all in on quitting.  In hopes of making a song you’d like, I went with my Sami music cheat code - namely that rock/emo vibe you were always a sucker for.  I never thought I would write a verse that included Demi, Swayze, pottery, and ghostly liaising, but here it is…

Lost & Found
When people say someone can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s always in a negative context - meaning someone gets so caught up in the details they can’t see the big picture.  But what if the details are the whole picture?  Like an artist obsessing over each individual brushstroke or a jeweler setting a stone by the micrometer, the intricate details create the whole.  That is 25 years of marriage.  It’s not some big picture construct.  It’s year after year of care and devotion.  Like a forest the individual limbs and leaves intertwine together to create a scene that, while not perfect, relies on each component to create the whole.  Each limb, leaf, or bead of rain has a purpose.  Every detail matters.  I still get lost in your details and in those tiny little things that no one else notices, I see my purpose.  I stay lost and found in your everything.

Dr. Seuss
“Red Lobster table boobies or maybe that was Denny’s”.  That line spurred this song.  I’ve realized that part of being together as long as we have, and part of getting older, is that we’ve built so many memories that sometimes the details blur or crossover from one to another.  You see the table boobies quote as coming from Red Lobster.  I see it at Denny’s.  I’m sure you’re right like you typically are about such things (remember the olive green loveseat example); I also don’t think it matters that much.  What matters is that all those memories swirl around in my head because we made them together.  Maybe I get confused on the location, or a color, or the date, of a specific memory - so what?  So many details
I come across remind me of you in some way and many of them are so vivid and moving that even if a couple of the finer points are wrong, they still feel perfect.  Everywhere, Anywhere.  Right Here. Over there.  A vision, a smell, the slightest of sounds, the shapes in the clouds, all around. Like a Dr. Seuss Rhyme.

Ghost Lines
I know that you know what an etch-a-sketch is, but I don’t know if you ever actually played with one.  It’s a toy that fits more squarely on my nerdy side of the aisle than yours. So let me explain what I mean by ghost lines.  I used to draw on my etch-a-sketch quite a lot.  Over time, I noticed that the more intricate drawings, or the ones I kept a while, never fully erased.  There would always be these subtle lines almost permanently burned into the frame.  Sure, I could do a new drawing and divert attention from them, but as soon as I shook it away, those lines would reemerge, almost mocking me.  I’m sure there’s an official word for that phenomenon somewhere, but for me, they’re ghost lines.

So what does that have to do with us?  Well, I’ve screwed up quite a lot over the years.  Bad decisions, too much drinking, selfish acts, etc.  All of those things survive in my head as regrets and shame.  Some are permanent.  Some come and go like they are haunting me.  For example, I haven’t listened to Crush by DMB for 25 years - can’t do it, won’t do it.  Every time I hear the bass intro, I’m reminded of panicking with all those people watching us during our first dance, and it hurts.  That’s a ghost line.

I’ll get to the point… Amid all the darkness of those ghost lines swirling around in my head, you’ve always been my source of light.  You are what keeps me drawing new pictures and new scenes.  You are what adds the touches of color and splashes of light.  I’ll always be a bit grainy and gray, but you make me better.

I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t put any sad songs in this compilation.  This one straddles the edge of happy and sad in a couple places but, to me, the overall message is of perseverance, devotion, and gratitude.  I hope that’s how you hear it.

Counterflow
This one is… uh, um… well, maybe just listen.