In the Key of K

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This is the second song from my first cassette tape from 1997. Three angsty verses, clean guitar, distortion pedal on the bass. I’ve re-recorded the vocals from the original four track tape. I’ve also tweaked a few lyrical lines that haven’t aged well. Additionally, I re-recorded the bass and guitar for the B sections in between the verses–they were horribly out of tune. the rest of the music is original.

This song originally had so much narcissism Narcissus would be like ‘That’s enough bro.’ 🤣 I would never write anything like this today. It’s that classic paranoia that everyone wants to see you fail but you rise above it. I’m thinking about a lot of rap music from in the late 80s/early 90s–that is what they would complain about–other emcees thinking they were terrible but they rise above it. Similarly, there is a vain of country music from the 70s and 80s that had similar sentiments. They all did it way better than me! 😃I digress, in reality, no one is really thinking about you as much as you think they are. I changed a lot of that with the re-write of the lyrics. It’s better now. The original vocals were guttural screaming and when re-recording I couldn’t get the tone and feeling right. After dozens of takes, I changed it up to more of a shouting style so that is what we have now. I just can’t do the guttural screaming like I used to. 🙅‍♂️I am not entirely happy with the end vocal–I had spent all afternoon trying to get the old sound and also screaming out Sticks to Stones so that my voice was shot when I did this one. I still love hearing this one.

The title is a play on words, is it good sleep, having a lot of sleep, or a place to sleep? Is it about consciousness?
//
Sleep Well
Who do you think you are?
You burn my eyes.
And do you think of me?
I’ve lived with guilt.
I am in my mind.
I know I am.
I burn inside. 
I burn for you.

The spark is in my mind.
I feel alive.
I’m not enough of me
But I’ve lived in filth.
There’s no debate.
I’m dirt and vile.
I don’t believe in them
because they’re wrong.

Who the hell are you?
Just who am I?
It cannot be denied,
They speak of lies.
I have to prosper.
I’m still alive.
And where the hell are you?
I’m next to you.
//

In the original version the last line of each verse was spoken/sang–it kind of broke up the flow too much and I could never get it to sound right with what was in my head so I stopped doing that for this version.

How to play it? The verses are super easy.

Verse:
C5*F5*|G5***| There are some touch harmonic doodles at the 5th fret on bass and guitar.

In between verses? Honestly, I can’t remember what chord shapes I originally used except that they weren’t all standard chord shapes. When I bought my first guitar and amp I also picked up a laminated two page chord sheet. It is lost now but I would try to incorporate some of the chord shapes into songs to spice things up. I would take one or two and ask myself “what can we do with this?” and then work at writing something. I re-recorded these sections due to the tuning being really wonky so this is what I play now:

|Cm***|D***|C***|G***|E***|F***|C***|D***|

I’m pretty sure that this was the chord shape (below) for the original Cm chord. I think I might have used some other variation of D also (only for the first D chord). Why did I mix minor and major C chords? Ask K from 1997, I don’t know. 🤷‍♂️
-3–
-1–
-0–
-1–
-x—
-x—
I haven’t been using the above chord shape as I relearned the song. The Cm bar chord in the third position sounds better. The rest of the B-section chords are all now played as first position open chords.

This is another example of a filler song to me. Not great writing and not particularly interesting. However, it is still my art and I still love it.