21 Days To Dudes: "Girl On The Roof"

In the 18 months between the recording of The Luxury Of Time and the first sessions for Mine and Yours, I wrote and demoed 34 new songs. I thought a lot of them were pretty good and I was excited to start recording. RCA, however, still wanted to hear some more single-ish numbers that might help make a dent in the impressively negative balance accrued by the promotion of The Luxury Of Time. This hurt my feelings a bit.

But one day, while I was out on a marathon walk through Manhattan, a very perky piece of music appeared out of nowhere, instantly hummable and possibly annoying. I worked it over in my head as I made my way down the Hudson, from the boat docks on the Upper West Side to Chelsea Piers, then crosstown through the Meatpacking District, across 14th St. and Union Square. The little musical nugget was the sort of thing I normally might have written off as being hopelessly derivative: It sounded like a cross between “Obla-Di, Obla-Da” and The Archies. But, in light of the recent comments about producing some hit material, I thought that something with familiar ring to it might come in handy.

A few evenings later a friend and I happened upon a suicide in progress. A massive crowd of people was gathered around 2nd venue and 10th St., watching a girl standing at the edge of a roof. Behind her, a policemen made slow gestures with his hands, trying to talk her down. Despite the potential ugliness of the situation, the air on the street was electric with anticipation. You couldn’t bear to watch the girl a second longer, but you couldn’t take your eyes off of her, either.

I wonder if, with a different twist on the lyric, “Girl On The Roof” might have been a hit. It’s a little scary when a song appears out of the ether. Especially when it already has a very definite shape and seems to know exactly what it wants to be. A good writer will recognize this and gently help it along; a less mature writer will insist on imprinting his own experience on the song, even if it might ultimately limit its potential.

It’s tough to get out of your own way sometimes. By imposing the suicide scenario onto the fun little musical nugget, I think I sabotaged “Girl On The Roof,” injecting it with enough lyrical ambiguity to ensure that it would probably never become its fully-realized self. It was more comfortable for me, more familiar, to cloak the song in a little bit of misdirection, a thin layer of melancholic smoke that might obscure its inherent joyfulness. This wasn’t necessarily the wrong decision. But it probably wasn’t the best one, either.

Sometimes I am not as interested in being successful as much as being comfortable. Being comfortable is about creating a sense of familiarity, so I try to alter unfamiliar circumstances to resemble those to which I am more accustomed, even if those familiar circumstances are not particularly healthy. This is why I used to drink a lot. This is why I fall asleep with the television on when I’m alone in hotel rooms. This is also why “Girl On The Roof” is about a suicide and not about sex, or flowers, or kittens.

In spite of my best efforts, “Girl On The Roof” ended up doing fairly well in the UK, getting A-Listed at Radio 2 and charting in the Top 20. Among other questionable media outlets, the song later appeared in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, a film that featured a bulldog with very swollen testicles.