AladdinFoot: "I Saw Her"

Tuesday, December 08, 2015

"I Saw Her"

I’ve written very few completely honest autobiographical songs. Many times I will take an incident from life, or take a thought or opinion I hold and expand it into a song. Reality is almost always altered beyond recognition before the song is finished. I’ve run into trouble with people who thought they recognized themselves in one of my songs, and I’ve had to emphasize that while my lyrics may be inspired by real events, they are not usually accurate accounts of the facts. I also enjoy adopting different personalities and perspectives when I write.

Thing song, however, is 100% authentic. I wrote it after visiting a girlfriend in college. We’d been apart since high school, and I could see the writing on the wall. We said all the right things, but the relationship was doomed by distance and the fact that we were both growing up. Driving back home after the visit, I was stuck in a middle-of-the-night traffic jam as traffic on Interstate 80 came to halt behind a tipped over semi. While waiting for traffic to clear, I wrote this song about the evening’s feelings.