This song is from an album called Giving Love and Hate. So far, the only track you’ve heard from it is ‘Til the End of the Evening. Thematically, the album is about big emotions, big colours, and trying to say things directly. In terms of process, a guiding principle was to lean in whenever something felt too much, too earnest, or too cheesy.
Sometimes, it’s too easy to stop when one feels one is transgressing the bounds of ‘good taste.’ To pull back and try and say the thing more obliquely. It’s also a kind of cowardice, a way of shielding one’s nakedness.1 But if artists don’t lean into cheesier, simpler emotions, or if they insist on maintaining some kind of ‘cool’ credo, they will necessarily fail to engage with large parts of the human experience. Because you’re probably cringy as hell sometimes.
As with last week, the lyrics to this happened to be in my lyrics folder while I was producing it, and I just slotted them in. It’s not really a finished song per se, more a handful of verses that seemed to hang together and which were emotional. But alongside the other songs in Giving Love and Hate it makes perfect thematic sense.
I made this particular version of For Thomas in December 2021. But the project folder has existed on my computer since April 2014 and has been through several transformations.
Here are two sketches I found in that folder. The first one is rough as hell but I’m surprised how much I like the second! Some might even prefer it to the finished version. Maybe I’ll try and finish it someday.2
Here is 14 May, 2014:
And here is 13 February, 2015:
After that, nothing until December 2021. I think there is some remanent of the original ideas in the finished version, but I’m not certain. Perhaps a heavily processed synth or something.
The Thomas is Thomas Mapfumo. I think the initial idea was some kind of garagey-dancey tune with Zim-pop guitars. But we’re not in Kansas Marondera anymore, Dear Listener.
At night, you're burned into my mind, With bellows full behind my eyes, Still, I feel like I'm to blame, We always do, we live in shame. Without your touch upon my skin, I feel your love but not your sins, You became my sweetest touch, When loving you became too much. Though light reveals another day, Daylight haunts in other ways, It's in the sitting that we feel, And in the living that we heal. At night I miss your resting face, I still need hours in my own space, Though it's time that helps us heal, Without touch no memory's real. And though there are flames, That never burned so bright, Under such illumination, Every flaw became a fight. And still I can't forget, Those blazing nights we shared, Of skirts and shirts and beds and heads, Sweat's wick for tender flame.
I guess it’s also cowardly to say you’re being cringe but that you mean it for ‘artistic’ reasons.
I can hear the faint lyrics I’m singing and I actually used them in a song last year.