The Meaning Of: SOMETHING WE DID
Crissi Cochrane
Welcome back to The Meaning Of, a series of blog posts exploring the meaning behind each song from my 2020 album, Heirloom. I’ll explain the stories that inspired the songs, and reveal some of the roots and references that helped shape my musical and lyrical choices. If there’s something particular that you’re curious about that I haven’t revealed, leave me a question in the comments below, and I’ll be pleased to answer it.
The next song in the series is Something We Did, one of my very favourite tracks I’ve ever written, and the final tune on the A side of the record on vinyl.
I often feel like my explanations, no matter the subject, are faulty; like I can’t possibly truly know the reasons why I do the things I do; at a molecular level I am a mystery to myself, and I can sometimes only guess. But when it comes to “Something We Did”, I feel like I can recall my intentions pretty clearly.
It begins in the summer of 2016. I was revelling in the steady paycheques coming from the Spotify success of “Pretty Words”, which collected upwards of 20,000 plays every single day, and with the security of a basic income, I wasn’t doing a whole lot. I was writing… I was helping friends write grants… but mostly, I was just relaxing, for the first time in my adult life. I watched all seven seasons of Mad Men, taking notes on scenes that might inspire good music videos, copying down my favourite quotes. The pilot of season one was called “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” - I liked the mystery and the intrigue of these words, but didn’t recognize them.
It wasn’t until later that summer, when I was looking through bins of old vinyl downtown at Dr. Disc, that I came across a Dinah Washington album and saw those memorable words on the track listing - “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”. I brought it home and immediately fell in love with the song. I remember spending long hours playing those chords over and over in my third-floor apartment, looking out the window across the treetops of the neighborhood, revelling in the beauty of the progression, learning how to thread my voice through the heart-rending melody.
That September, my friend Jay Verspeelt reached out to me about a photo series he was creating, spotlighting local women in an attempt to portray us in ways that didn’t hinge on our sexuality, and we made plans to take photos down by the water, with my guitar. I brought my classical, and arrived early, so I sat on a bench, playing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, turning the progression inside out, kneading it into new shapes while looking out at the Detroit skyline, the river bejewelled in the high sun. By the time Jay arrived, I had written all the chords for “Something We Did”.
Later that evening, I had my laptop open (and, most likely, I had “Mad Men” playing on the TV in the background), when I came across an Exclaim! review that someone had shared in my Facebook feed. It was the new band of my ex-boyfriend, someone I hadn’t thought about in a long time, and I was flooded with a heady mix of curiosity and shame. Who was I, when we were together? I certainly wasn’t the very best version of myself back then. I was, actually, probably some of the worst versions of myself. I was jealous, emotional, dramatic, petty; I overfed my demons and starved myself and lusted after others. But still, this person moves over the earth, with intimate knowledge of me.
I think that was the only time I ever felt just the slightest regret for not having subscribed to the puritanical idea of “saving oneself for marriage”. Because you do give a little piece of yourself away to your old lovers, even if it’s a piece you don’t miss, or one that you replace. They remember you.
But that particular shame was quickly struck down - I remembered, when I’d lived in Halifax, how I’d loved to read Dan Savage’s advice column, Savage Love, in the weekly arts and culture newspaper, The Coast. I credit that column with doing a lot to educate me on social issues surrounding sex, gender, and humanity. That sex work is work, work that fills a need. That all humans have a need, in varying degrees, and it’s dangerous to repress it. Everybody’s got to get off sometime.
And so I laid down these thoughts over the chords I’d written by the river that day. “Something We Did” was born. I won’t say that I reclaimed that piece of myself that I’d given away - I don’t think that’s a thing that can ever be done, or undone, and nor would I want to change the fact of the past - but I feel like I touched that missing piece, saw it for what it was in hindsight, and gave thanks. I still don’t really know if it was that earth-shattering, soul-moving kind of love - was that love, or just something we did? - but it was definitely a kind of love, and I’m glad that that miserable version of myself was still loved by someone.
There are a few other small notes I want to share about this tune. First, I love that I was able to, more or less, reinvent “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” for my own catalogue - not only do the chords pay homage to this old jazz standard, but I’ve thematically kept the same subject matter intact. These songs are so very different, and I think few would really see the similarities between them, but in my heart, I can feel all the threads that they share.
Second, this isn’t the first time I revisited this relationship in song. I wrote an open letter to this person in my song “Never Will”, from my Pretty Alright EP. That tune was a lot more earnest and clear - hey, how’s your brother? I hope your dog is still around - but the underlying motive was the same, a little impulse from an old nerve ending, wondering how that severed connection is mending. I don’t know why it is that I’m still writing songs about this person. I guess when your range of romantic experience begins to narrow later in life, you might draw water from the same well sometimes.
Lastly, “Something We Did” is the only song I’ve written where the lyrics use the word “song”. I’d always felt it mildly awkward when a songwriter talks about the song that they’re writing within the song itself, which mutated into me being unable to even use the word “song” in any context lyrically. Somehow I give Elton John’s “How Wonderful Life Is” a pass, because it’s just so earnest and beautiful, but Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” made me cringe for such a long time, and I’m still not sure I’ve ever really enjoyed it. I really don’t know why it bothered me so. But I’ve often said “you can’t unring a bell”, meaning that we can’t take back the past, we can’t undo our knowing, and in the context of this song, where the subject is a songwriter too, it morphed into “I cannot unwrite a song”, and felt so right to me. You can’t take back a song. You can break the record, you can tear up the score, but the song will always exist, so long as there’s someone who can remember it.
SOMETHING WE DID - CRISSI COCHRANE
How can I make peace
With the side you've seen of me?
There's something to be said
For sleeping in your own bed
But do you remember me
Lying in your arms,
Do you remember my charms -
All the good, or just the bad?
Or did you let it all go?
Ah well, guess I'll never know
Cause everybody's gotta get off sometime
You and me always made it to the finish line
Was our love a privilege
Or just something we did?
Something we did
I get the strangest feeling
When I see your name
Feel the burn of an old flame
I thought that it was all gone
Ah well, maybe I was wrong
Cause there's no denying what felt right
All those good things
They lived on and on
Even when the moment's gone
I cannot unwrite a song
Was that love - or just something we did?
Was that love - or just something we did?
Was that love - or just something we did?
Cause everybody's gotta get off sometime
You and me always made it to the finish line
Was our love a privilege
Or just something we did?
Something we did
Something we did
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