March 16 - Cutter

OK, so full disclosure: I've been on holiday and am currently sick for the second time since the last block update I did. This is why these are late and why this is incoherent.

Makes sense therefore that this is a sort of hidden track, with only live versions. Adding to that, March 16 is John's birthday. Adding to that, March 16 is one of my two anniversaries.

This is a song about things being bad and getting communications from a distance, and they don't make your troubles go away but they do give you some of the support you need to hold them properly. On March 15 1999 I was a mess. Less of a mess than I had been at times before that, less of a mess than I was probably going to be at times after, but I was someone only just starting to work out what being happy meant and someone not very good at it.

I had good friends around me at university, and I had a loneliness that manifested as the fear that nobody would ever really think I was good enough. And yeah, everyone gets that, I ain't special for being broken, but in this particular case it grounded in feeling like nothing I did creatively would ever fully pan out. I'd been kicked out of a band. I'd co-written a play that I enjoyed doing but that a variety of trendy people really disliked. I cared too much about what other people thought, and that's the surest recipe for being miserable I know.

But there was this girl. I talked to her online a lot. She was sweet and creative and much funnier than me and everything was easier when I'd talked to her. If she'd lived in York I'd have probably entirely messed up making a pass at her by now. But she lived in Kentucky, and because all I had were her words and her voice I didn't know how to turn what I felt into something I could articulate.

On March 16, I figured it out. We've been together ever since, our troubles wrapped in each other.