Lost Songs: Cynthia, No

Away from your arms I'm shaking

Here’s another song that never quite found its way to something. I wrote this in 1999 or thereabouts. I was writing a lot of songs at that time. I was newly moved to Portland, living in a duplex on North Halsey, working what would end up being a temp job at a scenery shop, building sets for commercials and local theater production. We would deliver these sets in pieces to whatever theater or studio that needed them and it was my first time getting the lay of the land. One job brought us to the southern suburbs and I remember reading the street sign for Salamo Road and thinking it had a kind of cadence to it. Cynthia is a fictional person; our poor narrator is fictional voice. Whoever it is, they’re obviously in a lot of pain. I ended up recording it in 2011 or so, when I was pulling out these abandoned songs and recording them for various reasons: sometimes for posterity, sometimes to just give myself a template to mess around with for recording. I’m playing the drums here, which may be obvious to the real drummers out there. It’s a little crude.