Somehow You Remember Me

Somehow You Remember Me

"There's someone to catch me again and again "

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"Somehow You Remember Me" was performed by Rick Thorne and Relatively Few Friends

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All creative content created, developed, produced, and

futzed with obsessively by Rick Thorne

Another day begins wherever people are

They come to me from what used to be so far

Anna tries another exercise, always in some thought rehearsal
Tom scrimmages other images, topics strange and controversial
Carrie's talking about a play, Doug and Cheryl – pepper spray
Suzanne's talking 'bout UFOs, bar exams and god who knows...

These morning situations - foundations and frustrations

We always talk, and sometimes we agree
So many different choices, and there are so many voices

But somehow you remember me

Now I'm not the kind who lives in the past
But I've found those memories to be towers built to last

Lynn's done another thirteen-one, but that's really no surprise
Kenny's found another haunted ground with his paranormal guys
Gregory's got another song to share, Daric has something in his hair
Aurora's got stuff in her head, it's one AM girl – go to bed

More late night admirations, while I write new affirmations

And I sift through the dust of time’s debris
So lost in cyber grazing, I find it so amazing
That somehow you remember me

A time for lost and found; count to ten and turn around
Some sweet memories, and some regret
Somehow you all remind me, that wherever time may find me There's always someone who won't forget

Songwriter's Notes:

I'm a huge fan of social media. I love the damned things. I love reconnecting with old friends and making new friends and sharing random thoughts and reading other people's random thoughts and creating topical groups and participating in topical groups and sharing pictures of me and my dog and seeing other people with their dogs and cats and snakes and their growing children and sharing my professional acheivements and aches and pains and seeing other people's acheivements and helping them with their aches and pains if i can and...

And as now a long time user of whatever social media has been available on the internet, I still find little miracles in so many of these interactions. Yes, of course the interactions are overwhelmingly routine. It's easy to come to the conclusion that there's nothing exciting about another picture of someone's breakfast or someone's cat or someone's mirror selfie or pictures of a luncheon where I only know one person of the two dozen people in the image. It sure is easy to roll one's eyes at the same old thing. I post images of Kiwi and meals I cook too, and there's no doubt people with access to my feed roll their eyes too and quietly think "gawd Rick, another picture of the dog".

But - you know what? With very little more work than it takes to roll my eyes and laugh at another image of someone's pet or images of their European vacation or another lobstah roll, I can try to imagine what that momnent meant to them and how they wanted to share it with everyone else. And I know how much it means to them because I know what it means to me. I know how much my friend's cat means to her because I know what Kiwi means to me. I know how much someone wants to share a kitchen success because I know how much I want to share it. I know how much my fellow Red Sox fans love to say how the team is ruining their summer because it ruins mine too.

So one day, I decided to really pay attention every one of these interactions, routine of otherwise, and I tried to make them mean as much to me as they meant to the people who posted them. I tried to understand them from the perspetive of the people posting them. Most of all, I tried to truly understand why they wanted to share these experiences with a wider audience. In some cases, they were really heart-felt suffering or joy. In some cases, they were catching their friends up with on-going situations. Some were news, or politics, or stuff going on in their 'hoods. Some of the thoughts shared were just plain fun. But they all felt these were worthy of being shared and heard and talked about.

Finally, I strove to understand my own place in these interactions. It's interesting enough to share these seemingly mundane experiences at a deeper and more interactive level, but I wanted to take the whole thing deeper and try to imagine why these people wanted my involvement in particular. I understand why people want to share things going on in their lives; it's just what people do. It's an altogether different question to ask why they want to share them with me.

As the experience grew a story evolved. And as that unfolded, a format for a new song evolved as well. It was a rocker for sure. Given the story's focus on stories carried by multiple human voices, it was clear a vocal-rich song was evolving - one with lots of lyrics and lots of instruments. I knew it would be a hard song to produce, but the experience was amazing - it was borderline psychedelic with the colors of language and emotion and intregue and devotion.

I wrote the lyrics from three particularly intense sessions - the first one in the morning, the second late at night, and the last on what could've been a lazy weekend summer afternoon. It all happened years ago, and I was cleaning uyp some old files recently and I found the draft lyrics and it all came floooding back to me. I heard the melodies and chord progressions I had heard years before and wrote the final draft of the song in less than two hours. That's the part of the power of great experiences - sometimes, they really stay with you.

Special personal note: As I always do with these songs, I posted the lyrics above. Because of the personal nature of a many of these interactions and my zeal for protecting peoples' privacy, I changed several of the names of the people in the song. I won't tell you who's who, even if you ask (unless it's you).

Production & Musician's Notes

As you might imagine from hearing the song, as producer I wanted "Somehow You Remember Me" to be a rhythm section monster. I considered adding horns and even strings (and wrote arrangements for all of the above), but it need to just be stringed instruments, percussion instruments. and voices. And there are plenty of all of them.

Ok then - what rhythm instruments? I decided I wanted new and old sounds. There's plenty of electric guitar and bass in the song - they're absolutely necessary for the feel and groove I wanted - but it also includes mandolin and bouzouki. It's perfect for both the mood and the theme of the song. Social media is just a new expression of a very old concept: human beings sharing their thoughts with other human beings. Given this, a blend of new and old instruments seem the perfect artistic media for a song about social media.

The chord progression - like the lyrics - follows very deliberate mood and theme formats. The first two lines of every stanza are general thoughts about communication. Those first two lines are up-beat major chord progressions with bright cymbals as the percussive cutting edges. Once lyrics get personal and individual experiences come to the fore, the whole mood changes. As personal names and the thoughts those minds convey become specific and part of a binary experience between a speaker and listener, the chord progression features minors chords struggling to return to the brighter major chords. Most important, the drums leave the hi-hat and ride cymbals and go to the darker, more pensive tom-toms and the ground-pounding heartbeat of the drum set becomes the audible soul of the rhythm section. The tempo remains the same, but the cadence becomes more atavistic, daring to dig deeper and work harder for the message under the words.

I don't waste much time turning to richer vocal harmonies after the first stanza, and that too was a deliberate act. I found my social media experiment wasn't just reaching one voice inside me; it reached several. At once, I was the closely-listening friend, the silly comedian, the amatuer psychologist, the drinking buddy, the fellow frustrated sports fan, the neighbor, the cheerleader, the curious observer, and others. I found myself cycling through these various roles, often taking on more than one at once, and modulating which voice needed to be heard and which needs to keep his damned mouth shut. Yes - I discovered I didn't have just more than once voice on line looking for an ear; I found several inside as well. YEs indeed - it was quite an experience letting other peoples' interests take the priority for a few days.

The guitar solo was almost an accident. By now, you know I love guitar solos and work pretty hard to play solos worthy of your interest. But this one really frustrated me for a while. The original instrumental bridge just recycled the introduction chord progression, But as I listened to the song, that just felt wrong. It felt more pro-forma than truly artistically meaningful. I struggled with different chord progressions and even some different tempos and rhythms for that section, all to no avail. Then I realized the right answer was already in another part of the song - the personal experience cadence with the tom-toms. I re-recorded that brindge and it dawned on my immediately I needed to play a solo with a classical acoustic guitar over that percussive pounding. I loved the immediately. I worked out a nice solo - one I'm really, truly proud of - and recorded it in two takes.

I love singing this song, but as my creative advisor Nicole Lamm noted with her usual delightful humor in her very thoughtful and generous review "you are such a brilliant lyricist ... I would, however, not want to have to memorize the lyrics to this". Yep - that's been a challenge indeed, but like the experience of creating this song teaches, challenges are one of the things we compulsive human communicators live for.

A time for hide and seek; count to ten, pathetic geek
Some time lost, some time spent in vain
But somehow you sure did show me

Though the ground is firm below me

There's someone to catch me again and again

Every day's another day, whatever you've been through

And every new day's one more chance to start anew

Gary’s humble, but he sure does grumble
One more Red Sox late game bumble

K's aglow with pics to show, Karen's boy sure did grow
Rob is shining a cynical light

And it looks like Ro's doing just alright

Vic’s exchange says the weather’s strange

It’s New England – it'll change

Another day perusing - thoughts deep, sincere, amusing
All of them too short to some degree
But through the massive turning

Cosmic winds, and heavens burning

Somehow you remember me
Yeah friend somehow you remember me

Rick Thorne: all stringed and percussive noises and continuing vocal abuse

Creative advisor: Nicole Lamm

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