Sorry for the late post. I’ve been trying to get a Rootbeer Report out every Thursday or Friday, but here it is, the following Monday. Truthfully, the reason I hadn’t posted is because I couldn’t decide what I wanted the featured image to be. I’ll explain later. Anyway, this post is about “Cold Turkey,” which was not a song originally planned for Fear of Success but it found its way on the project anyway.

A Dive into Darkness

Writing this is painful. Remembering what was happening in my life when I wrote the song is agony. May – June 2013 was easily one of the most stressful times for me emotionally and the most challenging for my sanity. Everything was going wrong all at once and when I reached a point where the suicidal thoughts got worse than they had ever been in my then 24 year old life, I did something I’ve only done enough times to count on one hand: I prayed. I got on my knees, crying and whispered something along the lines of “I’m not sure if I’m being tested, but if I am being tested for something then I don’t think I’m the right person for it because I can’t take much more.”

I believe organized religion is the foremost issue in our society, yet I wept to the ghosts around me as if they were sacrificing my first born to some vengeful deity.

Like, when I say on “Midnight Snack” that this album was made during one of the darkest times in my life, this was the epitome of it. The people I thank on that song were there to talk me down at 4:30 in the morning. But this post isn’t about “Midnight Snack,” it’s about “Cold Turkey.”

Every Woman in my Life with Animosity Toward Her

As I said in my Fear of Success post, it took two failed relationships for this project to get done. This song actually isn’t about an individual person. It started out being about the girl in the first relationship, but she was the same one who was the subject of “Perfect for Me” and I didn’t want to dedicate too much of the album to her. For quite some time, it remained a half-written song that I didn’t know what to do with.

It was the second breakup that caused me to finish the song and though that relationship was much, much shorter, its ending was more painful. She was, in many ways, all I had. I was told my mother has dementia and was given ten years to live, maximum. These would not be ten quality years either. She would deteriorate and eventually require institutionalization. Then, on April 30, 2013 I had to drive my mother several hours to a mental health facility so she could get her medications straightened out. This is a woman who had battled with addiction all her life, but who had also made AA her family and had found release from alcohol’s hold over her. So I have a mixed reaction whenever my mother is considered “clean and sober.” Being alcohol-free since 2000 is an impressive accomplishment, but replacing it with pills is, in both behavior and intent, the same problem. We blame the addiction, not the addict, though at some point the whole situation becomes so taxing that the support no longer has the strength, resources or willpower to help.

While my mother was the mental health facility, my grandmother had a stroke and wound up in the hospital. Between visiting my grandmother as often as possible because I wasn’t sure when the last time would be, to answering delusional calls from my mother trying to con her way out of the mental health facility, and lest we forget the open wounds left over from a five-year relationship that ended only a year prior – I clung to the only comfort left in my life. Unfortunately, that was a recent grad school graduate whose time consoling my needy, overly forward-thinking and idealistic ass would have been better spent making moves professionally. The first time I saw those decisions being prioritized over me (despite how logical it was to do so), we engaged in a conversation we would not make it out of. I could describe the nuances, but I’d rather not relive it.

Back to Writing

My father found out a day or two after she and I called it quits and wanted me to stay with him for a couple days. I did, but unfortunately there wasn’t much to distract me in the Pocahontas woodland paradise that is my dad’s house. I was pacing back and forth, hoping she would call and that maybe we could work things out. That’s when I realized…it was the same hallway I was pacing in while writing “The Best Nightmare” which inspired the line “up in the hallway pacing, pacing.” So I started writing “I just realized I’m in that same hallway, pacing.” That’s the hallway in the featured image on this post, which is something I had to drive all the way to my dad’s to snap and why this post got delayed.

Before long, I had the first verse of “Cold Turkey” and a few stray couplets written. Thematically, they fit really well with the song I had started long before – the one about the first breakup. After a bit of fine-tuning, I had the three verses. In fact, the last time I touched the lyric doc was only five days after the breakup. I thought about a hook and decided against one, reasoning that it would give the song too much of a processed feel. I just wanted bursts of raw emotion. I told Rawhide this and that I needed a beat. The following was his response:

I worked on a lot of this last night and since like 2:00 this afternoon here are 15 beats that may work for your song (and maybe even the other one you messaged me about) There’s quite the variety here; most of these are the most recent beats I’ve made during the Reason to Believe production process, making them really good, full of live instrumentation, really full of emotion, kind of experimental, and some of my favorites. Also be aware that almost every single one of these is unfinished; in that they’re a work in progress and shortened by a verse or two. But if you like one let me know and I’ll work on extending it and making it fit. I really hope you find something that you like here otherwise I’m like a frat boy’s t-shirt at a beer-pong party with five finger death punch blasting in the background: tapped out. haha

P.S. My vote goes to the beat I named “Gently.” I think something really special could be created with that, I just haven’t been able to do any justice yet with any of my songs.

But I didn’t go with “Gently.” I went with one called “deeper” which he then extended and perfected. To this day I’m writing to some of those other 14 beats he sent, some of which may appear on future projects. Eventually I laid “Cold Turkey” to tape and Dan did the mixing.

Closure?

We didn’t think my grandmother would recover, but she did – as well as you could expect anyone in their 90’s to recover. As for my mom, she’s had additional visits to the mental health facility for abusing prescription medications since then and, in the process, we learned that the dementia was a misdiagnosis. She had done so much doctor shopping that she ended up on anti-psychotic medicine and a bunch of other substances we weren’t aware of that had completely invalidated the previous tests. She was tested again, which came back negative.

Commentary

Some of us have a Jonah Complex and keep stalling

A Jonah Complex is a fear of success.

I can’t focus even though I sit at my desk

Here’s the line that ties it to the 9 – 5 theme.

She don’t put me down like you, no mercy

This is a reference to Joe Budden’s “She Don’t Put It Down Like You.” I used to download a bunch of albums when I would drive the several hours to visit Second Breakup at grad school. That album, No Love Lost was the first album I listened to on one of those trips, though, ironically, the line itself better reflects First Breakup.