5 Days To Dudes: "Last Train Home"

Bill and I wrote “Last Train Home” after he returned from a visit to his parents’ house in New Jersey. He showed me the first verse of the lyric at his piano one day and I got the basic layout of the music pretty quickly. It was good. I assumed the lyric was a nice reminiscence about two lovers spending a day in the city but, as we began honing the individual lines, Bill sheepishly confessed that the song was actually about being on the train back from Manhattan with his mother. During the ride she had fallen asleep against the window. The fluorescent lighting cast a certain pallor on her face, and Bill was hit with the realization that, someday in the not-too-distant future, she would be gone.

I love it when a song begins to feel like it matters, like there is no longer an option to not write it. After Bill revealed the true intention behind his lyric, we couldn’t just make it another cute nostalgic ditty about young love. It had to be more immediate, more relevant. Approaching “Last Train Home” as a history of a mother and son’s relationship moved the song out of the past and into the present tense. Everyone’s parents die. I had barely processed my own feelings about it; suddenly I needed to write the song as much as Bill did.

This all had a huge effect on how I would later approach writing the songs for Dudes. It showed me that, by getting more detailed and specific about an experience, it was possible to actually expand the possibilities for emotions a listener might experience with the song. If “Last Train Home” had been written as a simple love song, it would have only resonated on one level. But because it stayed true to the specifics of Bill’s experience, it became a love song, a memoir, a tribute and a rather comforting dirge, among other things. To wit: ABC eventually used the song in one of its programs, specifically in a sequence featuring people arguing and then ending up in bed together. Go figure.

I don’t claim to understand how all of these interpretations connect. I don’t really want to understand it; as a songwriter, it’s not my job. If I put something into the world that is honest, it will most likely attract honest responses. This is all I can hope for. This is success.