I wrote this song in 1986, while living in State College, PA while in graduate school. It was a weird time of life. I had left my first career of aerospace engineering after being offered an opportunity to pursue some graduate research in semiconductor technology -- which, as it turned out, interested me even less than aerospace engineering. Of course, I was actually pretty good at aerospace engineering. Not so much with semiconductors.
I believe it was shortly after the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, a sad affair that I watched with a few of the giggly undergrads I was living with (along with one other guy who was doing graduate work on logistics -- there were always copies of some trade newspaper laying around with stories about this or that tanker being delayed in port, or whatever). Anyway, that was a depressing day. And I also found myself in a graduate quantum mechanics course, my head swimming in bizarre concepts that I didn't understand. Fortunately, the professor was a very nice old fella who was very helpful (I think he personally knew some of the really old-timer quantum geeks from the early 20th century).
Between that class and another that was a deep dive into Lagrangian mechanics (which, weirdly, did interest me), my head was spinning for weeks. So I found myself sitting on my bed with my guitar, and I was picking the chords to a favorite old standard of mine, Moonlight In Vermont. If you’re familiar with that song, it has a really interesting chord change at the end of the second line of the verse – a ninth chord with a unexpected deep dive to a bass note in the melody (…falling leaves a sycaMORE). I always loved that note. So I said to myself, “Self, go ahead and steal it.” So I did. I didn’t steal anything else – just that chord and that note. Which is hardly a theft really, because, if that were the standard, every song ever written would be an act of thievery. But it is such a unique and obvious melodic hook, I suppose my little act of thievery stands out a little more. But, hey, I’ll own it. There’s a fine line between theft and homage.
So I wrote the song -- a love song that simultaneously explores the philosophical basis of truth. Yeah, that'll get her heart pumpin'...
It was around this time that my three-year musical collaboration with a dear friend was coming to an end. I was a 1984 Princeton graduate; he was 1986. We wrote a lot of songs together. Apparently, sometime that spring I returned to eastern PA, and Peter and I found some time to play some music. And, also apparently, I showed him this song, and he liked it. I have no recollection, TBH (I suppose my head was still spinning from semiconductors, quantum mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics). But I do know that Peter and I rekindled our collaboration in 2022, and committed to recording all our songs. And I found it curious that Peter suggested that we record this one early on – curious because we only learned this song at the very end of our tenure in the 80’s, and probably never even played it out. But Peter thought we should make it a priority. And so we did. And this is the result. The song is very close to the original, except I thought it needed “something”. So I added the intro and bridge in the fall of 2022. We both liked it, so this version includes it. And a pretty little cello part.
Finally, many thanks to my nephew, Jim Marchione, for mixing it for us (and adding some cool nuance). He is quite the audio genius, if you should ever need someone to mix a record for you. Enjoy.
The Causal Attraction of Two