Song Blog: The Slopes of Nagano

Welp, bugger. I always say 'if you can't laugh, what can you do!' but there are some things that are VERY hard to laugh about. This song came to life off the back of a particularly nasty break-up, which I felt extremely responsible for. The break-up occurred in the morning just before I had to go and pretend to be super happy in front of a bunch of very bored beauty students, and then I had to streak across Tokyo to cover someone else's class. I remember writing the first two verses of the song in my head while I was on the train. I couldn't think about the break-up as a recent thing because it felt awful, so I imagined I was looking back on it from very far into the future.

That night, I got hideously drunk - the kind of drunk where you know you've had enough to put down a horse, but there's none of the giddy happiness that alcohol usually brings in its primary role as anesthetic again the world. Despite this, I woke up the next day feeling fresh as a daisy (and probably still drunk) and set the lyrics of the first two verses to music.

The third verse came much later on. Don't ask why. Some songs carry on writing themselves. I found myself unconsciously changing lyrics during the recording, too. Really weird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBG2jDRHyfs