Restless

Lyrics:

You’ve flown away from every place that ever felt like home to you,
I dunno why you feel so restless, in need of something new.

But I don’t want to be the one,
Who’s always waiting ‘round for you to call.
And I can’t help but fight the feeling,
That maybe I’m being played for a fool.

Now it seems you’ve gone and found yourself somebody new,
You say, “no, he’s not better, he’s just closer than you.”

It’s not my fault that you can’t settle,
It’s not my fault you flew away.
You say 22’s too young,
You still gotta see the world.

Well there’s more to life than drunken encounters and partying all night ‘til dawn,
Sometimes the best things in life are hidden, or something small.

But instead we fight each other
And cry ourselves to sleep – maybe that’s just me.
But I know you still have feelings
You can’t resolve just yet.

Should we just end it, pull the noose, cut all ties?
Neither of us wants that, we wanna be in touch when we’re 65.

So maybe 22’s too young,
To settle into routine.
Who says we’d need to be routine?
By the time you say that you’ll be ready,
Half my youth’ll have passed,
And you’ll have missed the best of me.

eamon brett 2011

about this song:

The music nerd in me is really pleased that this song could possibly be described as being in a sort of Rondo form. That wasn’t planned. The lyrics were written while on a train to Dublin, along with the lyrics for Rerun. I always see those two songs as being sort of flipsides of the same story.

It’s one of the songs I tracked on the first day in the studio, and made a complete shambles of. I tried tracking the piano and the vocal separately, and it just was a disaster. Then, towards the end of the recording tracking, I set aside the last day to track this one live with the piano and vocal together, as the vocal really leads the song more than the piano, which just sits back and pretends to be an acoustic guitar in places.

Initially, the idea for the whole album was just piano and voice, and for songs like this in particular. But we added the smallest hints of cello on to this song to give a extra note of colour to the C sections, which helped give the song as a whole a bit more definition. It’s the loveliest little melody that Aonghus adds to those sections, and it brings a gorgeous extra hint of melancholy to the song.

Song credits:

mister ebby – piano, vocals
aonghus mac amhlaigh – cello

Video:

This video is of the demo version of the song, back when it was titled “The Best Of Me”. It’s just shot with the webcam on my mac, but it kinda fitted the demo quite well – as if I was singing it over a Skype chat or a Google+ Hangout to the person the song is aimed at.

Of course, another version of this song in demo form, with the final title, is also a video on my youtube channel. Not much of a difference, except that this version is a live demo, as opposed to a webcam video shot to the other earlier demo, and this is pretty much how my Google+ Hangout concerts look.