The Broken Places Lyrics

«‘The Broken Places’ starts off with a vocoder loop. See, when I’m making an album, I’ll tend to write about 300 songs and narrow it down to the 15 songs that are on the album, which isn’t to say that the songs that don’t make it onto the record aren’t any good. It’s not like 300 amazing songs and I have to get rid of 285 amazing songs. Some of them aren’t very good. This song ‘The Broken Places’ was a weird instrumental that I’d written that I liked and thus assumed no one else would like it. And I played it to a few friends and they were like “Ah actually that’s interesting”. The more I lived with it the more I liked it. And what I love, it’s quiet repetitive and almost every element in there is broken, which I guess in keeping with the title but it’s an old Korg vocoder that barely works. I forget what drum machine I used but one of those, I think it might have been a home made, there is this company from Ohio called Paia and I got a home made kit drum machine that someone built in the 70’s. Again, it just barely, barely works. So I felt like this was a broken down, sort of winsome, endearing, electronic piece of music. I needed to come with a title for it. That’s the tricky thing with instrumentals is what you call them. And this one, there is a Ernest Hemingway quote, which I think I’m paraphrasing but basically says, life breaks most of us and some of us are stronger at "The Broken Places", and I’ve always loved that quote, which I’m paraphrasing. And so I liked that as an introductory album title for the album because it does sort of emotionally set the tone for the rest of the record. The one regret I have about that first song is the original version is about 8 minutes long and just keeps repeating for 8 minutes. And I was kind of a sissy and I thought that having an 8 minutes repetitive introductory song in an album was just a little too much to expect anyone to get through. So I was a sissy and I edited it down to 3.5 minutes. If anyone wants the full 8 minutes version I am happy to send it to them.» thelittleidiot