Smile

One of my first jobs was working for Portland Parks. As a young songwriter at work emptying garbage cans and putting out sprinklers, I would come up with lyrics and song ideas all the time but I never hand paper handy to write them down.

One day I saw a kid with a black eye at the playground with his dad. There was a sad look in the kid’s face, he said his dad did it. The father made up some excuse said he bumped into something but the kid did not look like he was joking. I felt he was abused, Maybe I was wrong but what could I a 17-year-old teen do about it.

Later within the same hour in the same park, I saw a woman sitting on a bench talking to herself. She was obviously homeless and as I picked up trash around her I wondered how did she get there. I could tell that she was once a beautiful lady but now her hair was all matted clothes dirty and reeking of piss and alcohol.

I sat down that evening after getting home and I thought about what I had seen that day and other days. I had seen junkies digging though the dumpsters, I would find used rigs next to park picnic tables, swastikas on the painted on the wall, there were so many other things I wrote seven verses worth of material and I cut it down to 3 to fit the song.

I wondered how they got there, what kinds of pains they endured or did they just give up or just simply did not say no to drugs when faced with peer pressure. How could people ignore this because they just don’t know what to do?

The original music I wrote for this was very different I was a total metalhead but I had some friends that listened to The Cure‘s album Disintegration. I got into the melancholy sound of their music and assimilated it into my style of writing and came with the verse riff. I was influenced by early Red Hot Chili Peppers music so that kind of led to the style of the chorus.

The 3rd verse almost sounds like a political statement but it more about others taking advantage of others without considering the consequences of their action. It’s about the manipulators, drug dealers and encompasses those who abuse their power over others.

We recorded the demo in a basement on an 8 track analog reel to reel. Smile was one song off a 6 song demo that we paid $500 to record which is pretty small when you compare it to the cost to record Nirvana’s Never Mind for $130,000 or $650,000 to record Green Day’s American Idiot. There are some parts I wish we would have spent an extra $25 to fix but we just needed something for booking gigs.

Walking in the park on a chilly day, I stop and watch as the children play,
Look at the little boy with the big black eye, his daddy beat him for no reason why. Look at the junky with a rig in his vein, he’s so lost can’t escape the pain,
He couldn’t run from a world that lied, took the needle and found a place to hide.

Chorus
I stop and wonder how this could be, we all turn away so we don’t see.
What to do well I just don’t know, I wonder if I’ve even got a soul.

I just wonder at the pain of it all, Swastikas painted on the wall,
So much hate and so much pain, look at the world that has gone insane.
See the lady who has lost her mind, talking to herself in a world unkind,
Used to be pretty used to have pride, chose the bottle and rotted inside.

Chorus

Bridge
They say the sky is blue, to me it’s gray.
Can’t seem to face the truth, can’t face the day.

Verse
I search and I climb but can find no sympathy, no peace of mind,
I’m so lost in this human zoo and do not know just what to do.
Being led like a mouse in a maze, staring off in space got lost in a daze,
Beware of the cat whose fat with pride, he’ll swallow you whole and you won’t know you’ve died.

Chorus

Smile

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