Annotated Songs: Make You Better

Your tattletales, suffered

MAKE YOU BETTER¹

I want you, thin fingers
I wanted you, thin fingernails²
And when you bend backwards
I wanted you, I needed you
To make me better

I loved you in springtime
I lost you when summer came
And when you pulled backwards³
I wanted to, I needed to
To make me better
To make me better⁴

But we're not so starry-eyed anymore⁵
Like the perfect paramour you were in your letters
Won't it all just come around to make you
Let it all unbreak you to the day you met her
But did it make you better?
Did it make you better?

I sung you your twinges
I suffered you your tattletales
And when you broke sideways
I wanted you, I needed you
To make me better
Ohh, to make me better

But we're not so starry-eyed anymore
Like the perfect paramour you were in your letters⁶
Won’t it all just come around to make you
Let it all unbreak you to the day that you met her
Did it make you better?
Did it make you better?⁷

And all I wanted was a sliver to call mine⁸⁹
And all I wanted was a shimmer of your shine
To make me bright

'Cause we're not so starry-eyed anymore¹⁰
Like the perfect paramour you were in your letters
Won't it all just come around to make you
Let it all unbreak you to the day you met her
But did it make you better?
Did it make you better?

1. My recollections of writing this song are a little fuzzy, mainly because the song was written over a fairly long period of time. It took shape in a pretty haphazard way. The chord progression and verse melody existed first. I think I may have been admiring the chording in Laura Veirs’ “July Flame” and was low-key playing along with it when I landed on my own version of a kind of off-kilter octave chord that jumps around the neck. The off-kilter octave chord in question being that sussy B minor that shows up elsewhere in Decemberists music. The hook, this idea of “making yourself better,” appeared out of the blue while I was driving. I liked the cadence of the phrase and I liked what it suggested. Aren’t we all, forever, looking to other people, to outside relationships, to somehow heal damage that’s been done to us?

2. As is often the case, the verses come first. I rarely start out with a chorus. I had the chord progression, and the melody grew out of that. This business about thin fingers and fingernails? I dunno. It made sense. It arrived first. And sometimes the first arrivals are the ones that stay. I have a sense that it grew out of my thing with love songs that put a romantic spotlight on lesser-desired body parts. It’s the whole “and you’re drifting off to sleep / with your teeth in your mouth” school of lovesongwriting. I want your fingernails. That makes sense to me.

3. And here we have a classic folk-song motif — a love that surges and fades with the seasons. As an aside, Kelly Hogan, one half of our dynamic backing vox duo in these days, would fill her lyric book with little illustrations to help her remember certain verses and words. Here, she’d drawn someone in a row boat, “pulling backwards” on their oars. Whenever I sing this line, I can’t help but flash on that illustration. It helps me, too!

4. Our poor, codependent lovers. They are buckling under the ebbs and flows of romantic attachment, all the while trying to fix themselves, to make themselves better. Which, obvs, is not a healthy way to be in a relationship. Or is it? I mean, don’t we all rely on our relationships, selfishly, to suture our wounds?

5. This was not the first chorus to live in this song. I think I made several different attempts, but this was the one that stuck. This whole G-G-G-A bit is really leaning into its power pop origins. It’s a thing Big Star would do; it’s a real Cheap Trick vibe.

6. Even at the time, this was a bit of an anachronism. Who was writing letters anymore in 2013? Unfortunately, emails doesn’t rhyme with “better.” Or sexts for that matter. Neither of them rhyme with “better.” You know what does? Letters.

7. When you sing a song enough times, it tends to turn into nonsense, like repeating a word over and over again till it stops making sense. When I’m singing this song, I’m rarely thinking about what’s inside the song, the story of the song. I’m thinking about what the next line is, I’m thinking about how my voice is feeling, I’m focusing on whether or not the band is rushing or dragging. So now that I’ve written out the lyrics and am looking at them, line by line, certain things occur to me. I copied these lyrics from Google, and, of course, there were errors. Google has these lines as “It’d make you better,” and I hope that people aren’t hearing it that way. It’s really important to the song that these last few lines of the chorus, an echo of lines elsewhere in the song, are phrased as questions. Did it make you better? I’d forgotten, in all my singing of the song, that it is a question here. And, like the headlines of click-bait articles on the internet that are phrased as questions, the answer is typically no.

8. This part, the bridge, came last. I had the verses, I had the chorus, but it felt like it needed more. I liked the idea of the song opening up a bit, expanding out from its structure. The chording and feel definitely gives a nod to some perennial favorites — it’s the two headed love-child of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” and the chorus from “You Can Go Your Own Way.” I had initially envisioned it turning into a wild Chris Funk guitar solo bit, something that might stick around a bit longer that you’d expect, but it didn’t quite translate in the studio, despite our efforts. So we kept it tight. I still feel like it telegraphs that energy, without it overstaying. When we’ve played it live, we’ve given into that original impulse, and have let Funk’s solo go on for quite a bit longer. I’m on the fence though; I think it works better in its truncated form.

9. In the demo, this line is “All I wanted was a minute of your time,” but it always felt like a place-holder. I must’ve rewritten it in the studio, and I think I made the right choice.

10. As you can tell from the demo, which I posted last week, the build that we eventually got in the studio was not there from the start. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of situation, making it work so that this chorus towered over the two that came before it. It’s not an easy task, trying to out-big yourself. It took some doing. I think a big part was Kelly Hogan and Rachel Flotard’s backing vocal energy. I hadn’t expected that to be a part of the arrangement when I was writing the song; the concept of having two backing singers was a thing that developed as we worked on the record. I had always been curious about Leonard Cohen’s thing for working with women backing singers and wanted to give it a shot myself. The idea ended up, in my mind, defining a lot of the stuff that we’ve done for the past ten years. I’m less inclined to work in that mode now — I think I got it out of me — but I’m forever grateful to Kelly and Rachel, and Nora O’Connor, who took Rachel’s place on our tours, for opening up these songs in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.