An explanation of misunderstood songs a.k.a. Why I have no friends
I wrote and recorded a song once called Idiot Kids (see soundcloud.com/wartband), before I ever heard an Eliot Smith song, and it was about how holocaust deniers are wrong but so too is it stupid to be fighting over the desert land of the Middle East. It is unfortunately or not a an anti-anti- or pro-USA military song/anti-denier song and a punk song that is for a split second a rip-off of a Ten Foot Pole song instrumentally.
How to Save the World is rip-off concept (and rips off NOFX musically just a little) about how absurd we must look with our social, economic, and political problems to an extraterrestrial. It is is not anti-feminism or capitalism, it is just a comment on how there’s actually no way to fix many of the Earth’s problems because they are person-made issues mostly; monetary value and -isms are not tangible things, so G-d help us if there is a humanoid one, which I do not believe there is. But I see your point even if you have no evidence, I do, that you could be right. For now, G-d to me has no human form and only has pain and suffering in store for me.
Suicide.is.for.A-holes or S.i.f.A. is an anti-suicide song but also scathing of people who don’t understand and think depression is as easy to fix as just snapping out of it. It is not anti-engineer, engineers are an archetypal figure in this song representing the unfeeling part of society that just moves ahead and expects everyone to be gung-ho about everything.
This Machine…, originally with a much longer title, was about the emptiness of the party scene but is not a straight-edge song, it is against peer pressure to use drugs or alcohol, not for against responsible, legal, age-appropriate and/or prescribed use. But again, it was about how alone one can feel at a party and how meaningless things can seem. Not an original theme.
Lost and Found, my favorite of all my songs, is now called Found & Lost because I don’t remember how it is played on guitar and this makes me sad. It was originally called something too scary for parents and religious fanatics so was re-named and is about the new counter-culture of the 2000s that I saw around Northern California from 2002 to 2006. It is not for it or against it just about how dangerous it could feel but how liberating too. Written as it was from an outside perspective on it.
I Just Wanna Dance is an accidental rip-off at least in title of a Dane Cook track but the subject is raunchy, skeezy men. It is like an Eminem song, not an admission of personal wrongdoing but a song about a person doing not-so-innocent-things and a parent warning against ‘going with’ the main character male character of the song.
None of my songs were meant to be passive-aggressive digs on anybody, just a host of different perspectives none of which I necessarily endorse, but never, while writing, about a specific person. I can think of examples in my own life but that’s as far as the connection to me and former friends and acquaintances goes. For the record, I am for being a law-abiding citizen, and not a jerk; a person who contributes as much as he can to the economy and society he or she lives in. Falling short of this sometimes does not mean I still do not believe in it. If this makes me a sellout out of necessity, so be it.
Alex Ash Creative 