Track 6 – Baseball Diamond
Picking good titles is hard, right? I'm not just imagining that, am I? This song went through several titles. The one's I remember are anti-titles, like “Ode to Whatever” and “Long, Stupid Song About Nothing”. The latter was the official title for this song for quite a while. A friend told me this was a bad title. He was right, that is a bad title. So, as I was editing tracks for this album, I was trying to come up with a better one. I did come up with a better one. It was a good title. It had the same tone as the song, was memorable, not too serious, not too jokey. I forgot that title, so I just used the first image of the song, a baseball diamond. Now I can spend the rest of my life wondering what that other, better title was.
When I started this song, I was aiming for a drinking song style. I was also trying for that style in the song “Cost of Living”. Neither song ended up quite that way. This one turned into a pseudo folk ballad thing. I also started this song entirely as a joke. I meant the whole song to be silly, non-sensical. The speaker in this song is one of my favorite kinds of speakers, one that sounds reasonable to begin with, more or less, but spins out of proportion the more they are allowed to speak. This is such a character. There is all kinds of melodramatic stuff in this song that I find funny, like “through caffeine and TV screens all my passion's been diffused” or “with a body cut from sorrow and strings wound tight with scars”. When you make up songs, though, they often end up doing their own thing despite you. Also, sometimes you try to write non-sense and some real opinions start emerging any way. Oops. I won't tell you which is which, though. I have another friend who called this kind of joking, “kidding on the square”. That is what is going on in a lot of this song.
This performance is not great. You can tell, even in the first two lines that I hadn't decided how I was going to sing this melody before it was coming out of my mouth. So, there are plenty of sour pitches, and strange melodic choices. But, it keeps truckin' right along with confidence and in the right tone, which is why it made the cut.