Why
We Never Go Swimming and Other Short Stories
All the information you might ever want to know and more
Preface:
If you care enough to read the background information of
this album, it is safe to bet that you know a little bit about my discography.
This album is my first to stray from personal experience. It is true,
I did dabble with narratives and stories in both Give & Take and Beautiful
Like Words (see The Sea has Taken My Darling Away, Sunshiny Day, Girls
Should Drive Automatics), but for the most part the songs were derived
from actual things that happened in my life.
This album was born from an utter disgust for all things hyper-personal.
I found myself sickened by artists dragging their bleeding hearts across
the stage, lamenting about trivial things that we all deal with everyday.
I found myself enthralled with Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O
Conner and Eudora Welty. Dark and dramatic stories as lovely as they were
disturbing. And just as much as they are disturbing, I could see pieces
of myself in them. They catch a bit of what it means to be human.
For me, writing this album was violent and visceral. I was lashing against
the way I had written before. I became obsessed with dreary stories of
suicide, the idea of ghosts, reasons for murder, and infidelity. Despite
all of this, I would argue that this album is not wholly morbid. It is
easy to see that there are morals behind each story. In fact, I’m
still in inner turmoil as to whether or not some of my lyrics are too
didactic. Please forgive me if they ever are. There are reasons they are
there, and my arguments are cyclical. I had to choose.
I’ve toiled and stressed about these characters and stories so much
that they have become as relevant and true as any real experience song
I’ve ever written. I hope that you can relate with them too. Even
as I write, I am realizing that I’ve dragged my bleeding heart into
this album just as much, if not far more than the others before it. I
hope you can forgive me for being a bit of a hypocrite.
Thank you kindly for listening and reading,
elijah wyman.
Track listing:
Why We Never Go Swimming
Dove’s Blood, Desert Sand
What I Save in Flowers I Spend in Postage.
Everything is Black and White, Even if it’s Written in Blue Ink.
Crooked Smile, Weathered Scar
Girls Should Drive Automatics
The Life You Hide is the Life You Lose.
My Blood Will Cry Out to You.
The Storm Outside Your Car
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Why We Never Go Swimming
In my supreme nervousness about how my lyrics are understood I often find
myself wondering in mid performance of this song if people are taking
my words literally because I absolutely mean them to be. This is a song
about possible murder, guilt/suffering, suicide, redemption, and a broken
curse. When I say a character speaks after he’s died, know that
it is his ghost, and know that it is crucial to the story.
Also, when I say the line, “Swaying and singing,” I get the
impression that people think I am referring to him swinging while hanging
from the rope. This is not true. The old rope breaks as it breaks the
father’s neck. He is swaying while hanging to the top of the tree
with the rope tied around his neck. Singing in the wind one last sorrowful
song to his son.
Names of Characters:
Father: Saul
Son: Andrew
Daughter: Grace
Mother: Sarah
Narrator: Silas
Silas is the Grace’s fiancé. The two lovebirds grew up in
a small town in Oregon and went to the same schools all their lives. They
have only dated each other. Grace’s little brother Andrew dies when
he is about 7 years old, certainly old enough to swim. Grace remembers
her father coming home with Andrew limp in his arms, wet. He said he’d
only left him alone for a second. Grace is only 9.
Ten years later we pick up the story and Saul has become a miserable drunk.
He sits alone in the dark outside of Andrew’s old bedroom singing
to his dead son. He rarely speaks. Sarah does little to console him, and
over the years has grown bitter because she is left to providing for the
family alone.
Silas has convinced Grace to move to Boston, start a new life; go to college.
They are traveling across the country by train when she gets a call from
her mother. Her father has hung himself. She leaves Silas on the train
and heads straight home from the next stop.
Everyone in the small town is astonished to find the quarry filled with
water again. Saul was found by Sarah floating, smiling, broken rope still
around his broken neck.
*Silas, the narrator of this story, is the same person as the main characters
of Postage and Storm Outside Your Car. Please read on to catch where this
story leaves off.
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Dove’s Blood, Desert Sand
Five dollars. That was my allowance every week for doing my daily chores.
I remember saving up for five weeks to pay for half of a bb gun, my parents
paid the other half, and I remember how powerful I felt with that rifle
at my shoulder.
I grew up in a more than typical Southern Californian suburb where every
house in my neighborhood only varied by the wood trim design on their
garage door. White stucco, brown trim, red shingles, every house. Most
days I would hop over our back wall into the dirt alleyway that separated
my neighborhood from a near identical one behind it and follow its path
down to the river bed, sometimes with friends, sometimes with my dog,
but often enough alone, it didn’t matter much as long as I had my
bb gun.
I remember being told that Southern California is a well-watered desert,
and the river bed bore strong testament to that with its sandy paths through
packed and cracked dirt, sparsely dotted with tall, dried grasses. There
were clumps of dusty evergreen trees in the distance and thick bamboo
patches on small mounds. Gating it was a massive hill, probably forty
feet tall that snaked its way along the river. The front was dirt, and
the back, which faced the river, was cement poured over jagged rocks.
Along the top was a narrow strip of asphalt for joggers. I remember when
it was built to keep the river from overflowing, but in truth I’d
only seen that river with any water to claim twice in the fifteen years
I’d lived there.
I used to wander around collecting malt liquor bottles and any other curious
things I could find and line them up along a dirt embankment for target
practice. I remember how smooth it felt when you hit the bottle right
in the belly and saw it implode and crumple. If I pumped up a full ten
times, sometimes it would punch a clean, round hole through the glass.
I believed I had the most powerful bb gun in existence. I loved that gun
and any time I would go to visit my cousins in the desert, I would make
sure to bring it along.
I had three markers gauge what was left of the drive to my cousins. First
were the dinosaurs, two huge fiberglass monsters, a green Brontosaurus
and a red Tyrannosaurus Rex. I think that you could go inside them, but
truthfully I never did figure out their purpose, standing out there in
the desert, watching us as we drove by. The second is the field of windmills.
I knew that I was getting close when we reached them. They must have been
100 feet tall with blades as big as flying fortress propellers, and there
were thousands of them, for miles and miles all shimmering white in rows
like soldiers at attention. The third is the dip that makes your belly
tickle; when we reached that, I would know we were there.
I would get so excited to see my cousins David and Rachel in the desert.
The lived inland in a place called 1000 Palms and they had motorcycles,
and golf carts, and a pool, and a goat, and a turtle village, and forts,
and video games, all in a gigantic chunk of desert that resembled a junkyard
.
My uncle and aunt were collectors of mostly worthless but nonetheless
magical items. Uncle Andy was a mechanical wiz at a local hospital, so
there were broken x-ray machines and doctors’ tables sitting in
the sand. There were old cars and piles of rebar and strange sand like
substances spilling from barrels. There were tractors and twisted scraps
of metal and tools and countless cans and bottles filled with oil or paint
or something that looked like a mixture of oil and paint. There were also
old stage sets. The one I remember most was a massive whale with an open
mouth waiting to eat Jonah. All of it sat baking in the sun, anything
metal too hot to touch.
I had been dropped off to spend the week with them, and I couldn’t
have been happier. My cousin David is a month older than I; he was born
on Thanksgiving and I was born on Christmas. We used to spy on people
together, and have water balloon fights, and terrorize his little sister.
One time we built a rocket out of a paper towel roll and other random
things we found in the yard, when it launched it shot straight for the
neighboring land, as if it had been guided. It streaked by and spooked
a horse, which bucked its rider. The neighbors were livid. We wriggled
through the wire fence into their plot and walked into the scene, a man
on the ground, a horse held by its reigns, and 8 angry eyes on us. “Have
you guys seen a rocket?” David asked, and as soon as he did, we
noticed it nose first in the sand, next to the horse. We grabbed it and
ran.
David had a gun too. His was a pistol that looked like a 9mm handgun.
It was spring powered and you had to cock it every time you fired. That
gun was incredibly inaccurate. You could hardly hit a soup can from fifteen
feet away without the bb veering violently off course like a drunk changing
lanes. The first day when I arrived we decided to go out and shoot things
with our guns. Cans and bottles eventually got boring, they didn’t
move; they didn’t have a chance.
“Have you ever shot birds?” I asked my cousin.
“No way! Have you?”
“Yeah,” I said coolly.
“Betcha can’t hit that one up there,” said David, catching
the scorching sun in his eye as he pointed to the peak of a nearby tree.
“Yeah? I’ll hit him on the first shot,” I told him defiantly.
I remember lining up that sparrow between my sites. It was swaying with
the branch unaware. I remember squeezing my right hand and watching the
bird fall from its perch. David and I ran to where it landed.
“It’s still alive,” I said.
“We gotta finish it off. We can’t just let it suffer.”
“David, I can’t do that, you have to do it,” my stomach
was clenching with guilt.
I remember him cocking his pistol and holding it close enough to ensure
a true shot to the head and Iremember the soft thud it made when the bb
hit. We buried the bird under the tree it died in and covered the grave
with dried pine needles and twigs. We even found a smooth rock and propped
it up for a headstone. We tried to have a service but didn’t know
what to say.
The second bird I shot was sitting on a chain link fence. I had broadsided
it with my cannon ball of a bb. David and I weren’t the only ones
running after the bird when it fell this time, his two mutty dogs were
right behind us, wagging their heads back and forth as they ran, excited
by the hunt, like jackals. When we reached the bird we were appalled.
“That’s a dove!” cried David.
Oh no, I thought, I’ve shot the sign of peace!
The dove was cooing softly in the sand and walking in circles. When the
dogs reached us they immediately went after the bird.
“No, get out of here!” I shouted frantically at them and they
slinked back, confused. Each time they closed in I would yell at them,
over and over.
“What are we going to do? We can’t just leave it here, it’ll
get eaten!” said David with panic in his voice. I carefully picked
up the dove and cupped it in my hand.
“Well, the bb only went through his wing,” I said. The bb
fell to the ground as I gently lifted its wing to look closer, “and
it doesn’t look like it hit any bones, he should be fine once his
wing heals, right?”
We found some thick brambles and I placed the bird in a small clearing
where no animals could get in but the dove could easily get out when it
needed to. I wiped the bird’s blood from my hand into the hot, desert
sand.
We checked up on the bird every hour or so and made sure the dogs stayed
away from its bush. The next day when we woke up the dove was gone. Later
we bragged about the shot I made hitting the sparrow in the tree to my
uncle Andy.
“You’ve been shooting birds?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said, thinking surely my tough man’s man
of an uncle would be proud.
“Well, I guess that says something about your characters,”
is all he said. I didn’t comprehend the levity of the comment, and
even then realizing that I didn’t understand what he fully meant,
I remember feeling as horrible as when I had shot the birds.
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What I Save in Flowers I Spend in Postage.
*This story is a letter from Silas to Grace.
Where we left off, Grace has left to attend her father’s funeral
and her presumably mourning mother. This leaves Silas in Boston at a new
school, living alone for the first time. This is also the first time that
he and Grace have been apart.
In the beginning they are each writing and calling nearly everyday. Grace
is planning and saving to move to Boston and pick up in the next semester.
Silas gets busier with school and letters become less frequent. He and
Grace begin scheduling phone dates to acommadate his new schedule.
This is where the song starts. He has missed a few calls already, and
now Grace is feeling forgotten. Compounded with mourning the memory of
her deadbeat father, this is crushing.
Behind all of this, Grace’s mother is trying to convince her not
to move. She says she needs her help, and that there are other boys in
the world. As a last ditch effort Silas convinces Grace to drive across
the country and clear her mind. When she gets there they can talk it over
and she can choose whether or not she’ll move.
*Storm Outside Your Car finishes this story.
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Even In Blue Ink You Are Black and White
This story stands alone and needs no explanation. Just read the lyrics.
A bit of inside information though, when I first wrote this song I was
nervous to play it for people because I feared that they might confuse
the narrator with me. It took me a few weeks of keeping this song a secret
before I would show it to anyone, even my wife.
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Crooked Smile, Weathered Scar
This song also needs little explanation. In writing it I toiled on how
to address the man that the narrator’s wife/fiance/girlfriend (You
choose!) has an affair with. In the end I wrote the song as if the narrator
is speaking to (perhaps just in his head?) the man himself. I feel it
makes the lines more dramatic. The narrator cannot escape the heart wrenching
truth that the man who ravaged his relationship is holding his first and
only son.
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Girls Should Drive Automatics
This song was originally released on Give & Take in 2003. Even though
it was written about my own personal life at the time, I chose to re-record
it for this album because I think it is a good narrative, and the story
has become as relevant to me as a made up story. It is only connected
to me as much as it is to anyone else. Also, it sounds lovely with the
addition of the hammered dulcimer, piano, and bass. I could not resist
re-recording!
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The Life You Hide is the Life You Lose
One day Jules read a book called, The Secret Power of Notes! It was a
short book. Inside it said that letters were a fantastic way to add some
zest to any relationship. “Slip one in a coat pocket, leave one
on the table to be found, everyone loves getting a good note!” From
that day on she left notes for Tom, and sometimes Tom would leave one
for her.
Tom and Jules had a wonderful, whirlwind of a relationship. They met at
a party of a mutual friend and got serious quick. Not long after Jules
had moved in Tom had taken to staying out late and coming home drunk.
One night Tom didn’t come home.
The next day Jules found a hurried note folded once in the mailbox.
“Jules,
I’m sorry. I’ll be gone for a bit. If you need to get a hold
of me leave a note under the mat at the back door.
I love you,
Tom.”
This is where the song kicks in with the story. The next day two men arrive
at the house wearing suits.
*If you are wondering about the chorus in the end, it is not drawing a
connection between this story and the Why We Never Go Swimming cluster.
My Blood Will Cry Out to You.
This is a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. For more background
read it in Genesis chapter 4.
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The Storm Outside Your Car
Here’s the end of the story. When Grace gets to the East coast her
and Silas have a blowout and she calls the relationship quits.
Originally I had written a few other songs. In them you learned that
Grace had a nervous habit of answering her cell phone any time it rang.
In the last song she is driving home, haunted by her brother and father’s
ghost when the phone rings. It is Silas calling to beg her not to leave.
When she reaches over the seat to get the phone she accidentally drives
off the road. She picks up just in time for Silas to hear her crash.
I decided not to use this song and others because it was becoming too
predictable. Everyone was always dieing and all.
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Thanks for reading.
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