Reading · In the studio with The Static Dive

When I make an album, I start with a title. It usually suggests some loose narrative or philosophical theme. This is not a defined process.

Songs come and go, rising into and falling out of favor; ideas unhindered by good judgement. Quantity is filtered by quality at a later date.

Case in point; I knew my last album would be titled Blue Light After Party before I recorded a note. It was preceded by two records from the house band of the fictitious Blue Light jazz lounge. After Party was the same band cutting loose at a post-gig jam.

The band was really me. Don’t tell anybody.

I’m at the tail-end of this process in the production of my soon to materialize new LP, Samsara Blues. Eyeing the finish line, I was in need of a song to glue all the disparate pieces together. And the past answered.

I started The Static Dive in 2019. For thirty one years prior to that, I made music with my bands The Distractions and Shu. I also made a string of solo albums under my real name, Bob Smith (yes officer, that is my real name).

In 2006 I released The Reason for Swimming, the best of my Bob Smith albums. It was a deeply personal and not-too-cheery look at life, from the perspective of a guy in a struggling marriage as he dove headfirst back into alcoholism. (I got sober again in 2016 and stayed that way).

By some sick cosmic joke, that record is now twenty years old. I wanted to commemorate the occasion, but the options (remixing, remastering, re-releasing) all involved reliving unpleasant elements of that part of my life.

Then, about a week ago I was noodling on the piano and found myself playing the title track from The Reason for Swimming, as though it were a chill reggae tune. I hit the Record button and kept going.

The original song was a melancholy alt-rock search for purpose. I flipped the new version on its head, transforming it into an upbeat island groove with a Zen twist on the song’s originally nihilistic theme.

The title is a metaphor for the meaning of life.

The original version suggested, “Maybe we’re here, just to be here.”

The new version says, “We’re alive to be alive!”

The same guy is playing all the instruments, singing all the words, strumming all the same chords. Time and perspective are the only variables, and the tune became the Yang to its own Yin.

One caveat; I did change the lyrics in the second verse. The original lines dealt with my marriage and drinking problem, both of which are now distant in the rearview. The new stanza is more reflective of my current take on our non-reality.

[verse]

It took a step out my front door

And I took a look around

It was a different view than I knew

With a hundred different sounds

I took a step off the cliff edge

And I kinda liked the fall

If you don’t hit, then you missed it

Honey, I don’t miss much at all

[chorus]

We’re all looking for a meaning

Maybe it’s less than we think