While I was writing for Skeletons I was also simultaneously going back and forth between LA and Portland working with Lexi from Echos on all of the visuals for my first headline tour (the Rising tour).
Since I do a song a day, I was recording while I was up there as well - we would shoot all day from 8am to 8pm and then I'd knock out a demo before going to sleep. One day I asked if she wanted to do it with me and we made this track.
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Caught up in your frame, oh, caught up in your blood
Tangled in your veins, oh, in your viscera
Caught up in your frame, oh, caught up in your lungs
Tell me you are mine, oh, tell me with your blood
So cut me with your teeth
Take me with your touch
I'll be the in between
I will hunt you till your lungs fold
Take you down easy
Let you down slow
I'll be the gravity pulling
I'm the undertow
Ooo
Can you feel me on your skin?
Oooo
Take a deep breath, let me in
You know I'm caught in the middle of
Tangled in yoru veins, in your viscera
Tell me you are mine, oh, show me with your blood
Let me in your mind, oh, show me I'm enough
You know I'm lost in the shape of
Everything that slipped that day we touched
Caught up in your frame, oh, caught up in your love
I wanna be the air that's filling up your lungs
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I've talked a lot in my masterclass about cliches and why it is so important to avoid them. They end up being mindless blocks of text that don't really make the mind feel anything. It's like when your parents tell you the same thing a million times and eventually it doesn't even register in your brain when they repeat it.
There are lots of cliches that are universally applicable - aphorisms, idioms, things like that - but there's also a second category, for me, and that is personal cliches. There are a lot of words that are now in that category for me. Things that originally sparked beautiful imagery, but after enough uses have become thin and substanceless.
This track is full of those, so I don't feel like it has aged well. Blood, bones, veins, lungs, using the idea of entering someone's body as a metaphor for diving into their most intimate being. It's a bit tired to me. It's not that I don't use bodily imagery anymore, but when I do I try to make sure that it is expressing some sort of novel concept, or that the context it is in gives it a deeper and more cohesive meaning.
I think I knew it was prone to aging poorly when I made it, which is why I never really considered using it. If I had put it on the EP it would have replaced Silk which, though it deals with somewhat similar themes, I think is a vastly superior song lyrically and one of my favorite I've ever written.
What do you guys think?
-J