Conrad Blog:

Song-A-Week #28: Jealousy and Greed

Another junky laptop mic demo, since I'm waiting for the online retailer geeks.com to ship me the correct KVM switch... not that you need to know that, but that's whyyyyyy. Its pretty neat though. Here ya go!

Jealousy and Greed
Copyright (C) 2007 Matthew C Good

I'm looking for a game
where no one has to lose.
Cuz it feels so good to play,
to live life by the rules.

And when it comes to this mess,
I am of two minds
cuz I wanna get ahead,
yet leave no one behind,

So what are Jealousy and Greed
doing with me?
Why are Jealousy and Greed
part of me?

I am just a man
who's never seen his face.
Just some photographs,
an image in the waves

So what in God's name does it mean
to feel so in between
all the subjectivities
and the ideal?
What are Jealousy and Greed
doing with me?
What are Jealousy and Greed
doing with me?

---

I was at two of my friends' wedding the other weekend, and my bud and fellow songwriter-guy Jonny Weaver was there and asked me what I had learned from doing the song-a-week thing. I told him that I just don't have golden ideas every week, and that anybody that has a major life epiphany or emotional crisis on a weekly basis can not survive long. What that means is that I've had to fictionalize a lot of these songs, and I've tried tricks like writing them from different perspectives, or thinking up a character in my head and writing about THAT person. It used to be that my songs were pretty personal and about me nearly all the time. They're still pretty personal, but they are less and less about me, and more about somebody I made up, who may or may not be based loosely on someone I know. That's still personal, and I still have some kind of emotional connection with the characters.... which is weird. I've never had that happen before, really. I would assume someone who writes a lot of stories would probably know what I mean, but even more so.

But this is the first song in a long time that I didn't really have to fictionalize much on. Greed is something that I could see, check that, have seen creep into my life and spill ink all over the part of my brain where I wrote down that all people can be redeemed and deserve good will, and that helping others is about the most uncomplicated good that I can think of. ::sigh::

I guess that's why there's the sermon on the mount, eh?