Things That you do
A song about the anticipation of marriage
©2012 Song Arsenal Music LTD.
words and music written by Ian Patrick Gentles
completed Monday, July 16th, 2012, 11:09 PM
song #408, 7th song of Set 22
Complete and Finalized Lyrics
Me performing at the ‘Taps & Tapas’ writers round during our stay in Nashville.
Me practicing at the Stephen House in New Hope, PA on the morning of my wedding.
Patti and I performing with our band, ‘Working Class Hussys’ at our wedding. (Bassist Brian Casale in background)
Wedding CD cover
This is the insert included with my 5-song CD that we gave to our wedding guests. I recommend this for anybody who’s about to get married. It’s way cheaper than paying for everyone’s dinner.
Wedding CD
Note to those who attended our wedding: If you still have one of these babies, hang onto it. It’s going to be worth a lot of money one day.
This is what I call the ‘Sketch Page’. It’s where I actually write the song while doodling out my lyric ideas. You can literally see the work in progress among the written chaos here as I jotted down the words as fast as they came to me. The tune’s lyrics are edited, paired, deleted and rewritten many times over on this page as the song takes shape before committing to a finalized, completed version.
In one of my lyric books, I started writing down a brief ‘history’ of the song’s creation for posterity. I pretty much covered most of the stuff I wrote down here in the ‘About The Song’ paragraphs along the right column of this page, so don’t worry if you can’t read my chicken-scratch.
Song Buds
These are the ‘Song Bud’ recordings with their correlating sticky-note slips. This is the one I recorded in front of our Nashville fireplace. For a more in-depth and detailed description of the song buds, please refer to the scrapbook page for my song, ‘DNA’.
I you listen to the audio for this one, you can hear a conversation going on in the background between my then-finance and her mom. This is typical of me capturing an idea the instant it pops into my head so as not to quickly forget it. Since I can’t know when or where that will happen, it’s important to be prepared to capture it when it does- even when you’re supposed to be enjoying a lovely car ride with your future wife and mother-in-law.
About The Song
ITS INSPIRATION and MEANING
In the Beatles song, ‘In My Life’, John Lennon said he was partly thinking about his friend, Stuart Sutcliffe when he wrote the lines, “Some are dead and some are living/In my life I’ve loved them all”. However, this doesn’t mean that the rest of the song is actually about Stuart Sutcliffe.
In short, ‘Things That You Do’ appears to be about the anticipation of getting married- even though I’m only referring to marriage with the line, “Now you’ve given me your hand”… That’s it. The rest of it is a mish-mosh of jumbled thoughts expressing my admiration of my (then) soon-to-be wife, Patti. However, I’ve deemed it a pre-wedding song simply because those six words alone seem to make the rest of the lyrics fall into place as being about just that.
Another (perhaps even bigger) reason this song lingers in my head as being about marriage is due to the original lyrics of “She’s picking out her wedding gown”. Those words were thrown together for an early demo of this song that I sent to a Hip hop producer who wanted to hear more of my music. Although that line was later cut from the final version of lyrics, it had already impressed itself on me as a defining statement of what this tune is about. (You can hear that version of the song and read more about it below in the ‘Origin and Development’ section.)
Sometimes a song isn’t necessarily about any one particular topic, even though the writer may have been thinking about specific people and/or instances when they wrote certain lines. However, in the context of the completed work, it’s those one or two particular sentences that can bond a series of disconnected lyrics into a solidified thought and ultimately, (hopefully) an articulate song with some kind of comprehensive meaning behind it.
Not every song I write starts out with a strong, predetermined idea of what its lyrical content is going to be about, in which case I just do my best to congeal a slew of seemingly unrelated notions into a cohesive unit. I then leave it up to the listener to determine what it all might actually mean- and to that extent, whatever they decide, they’re right- because it’s about what it means to them.
Completed lyrics in lyric book.
ORIGIN and DEVELOPMENT
The main “things that you do” chorus/hook melody in this song came to me one night while standing in front of the fake fireplace in my Nashville apartment. I also envisioned a whole dance that went along with it as the tune entered my head. I won’t show you the dance right now. However, I will say that 2012 was a big year for me. My then-finance, Patricia and I spent about 4 months in Nashville before moving back to New Jersey to plan our wedding. I also couldn’t wait to record the backlog of songs I had written during our stint in music city, although ‘Things That You Do’ wasn’t one of them.
It’s somewhat of a cruel irony for songsmiths when listeners praise the tunes that the writer considers to be sub-par while overlooking their deeper work. In fact, it’s a common theme among artists in general who often spend years pouring their blood, sweat and tears into projects that they themselves see as their masterpieces while the general public gravitates towards their more simple and mundane creations. I think that’s the point Andy Warhol was trying to make. Still, unless you want to live your life as the unnoticed and tortured soul who nobody understands, you have to please an audience- or at least try.
Similar to my song, ‘DNA’, the genesis for turning several of my ‘sillier’ song-bud ideas into a completed song called ‘Things That You Do’ was hastened by (of all things) a Hip hop record producer who heard some of my music. He wanted to know if I had written any tunes that leaned closer to the rap genre. Well, no, actually. Not really. But when a Hip hop producer comes-a-knockin’, you don’t keep-a-rockin’. You rap.
I had the main verse (e.g. “I’ve gotta’ pinch myself to make sure…”) idea bouncing around my brain for a long time. Unlike most of my song ideas, it was more of a rambling-style stanza without a strong melody. With the right beats behind it, I thought it could be produced as a rap song. However, it needed a chorus. I tried pairing it up with dozens of other song buds I had laying around, but nothing seemed to fit quite like that ‘things that you do’ idea I had from Nashville- even though I didn’t care for the direction the song was going in when the two were paired. The weird thing is, I actually like these separate ideas on their own, but feel they cheapen each other when mated to become the verses and choruses of this particular tune. But since Patti loved it, I threw some lyrics together, made a quick recording, and sent it off to the producer.
While I don’t have anything against Hip hop, I must confess it’s not a genre I know a whole lot about. I do know that it can be just as versatile as any other form of music in terms of production and what it can say. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that my original lyrics of “picking out her wedding gown…” and other lines pertaining to marriage may not have been quite ‘gangsta’ enough for the fellow I sent my demo to (since I never heard from him again). That’s OK. Patti liked it enough to force me to include it on a CD of my songs that we gave to our wedding guests. And if that doesn’t buy me some street-cred, dammit, I don’t know what will. (See photos at above left.)
Lyrics for the recorded demo version of ‘Things That You Do’ that was sent to a Hip hop producer.
About The Recording
PROCESS, TECHNIQUES, PRODUCTION, SOUNDS, MIXING and MUSICIANSHIP
I always knew I was going to rewrite and rerecord a proper version of this song after not hearing back from the producer. As I made it clear in the above paragraphs, this definitely was not one of my favorite song ideas to come down the pike, and a complete overhaul could possibly remedy my feelings towards it. The first difference was adding what I call a sort of ‘refrain’- or ‘mid-section’- after the choruses (the part that goes, “like lifting me out of the blues”). I also extended the intro while keeping the same, basic drums from the demo- albeit with several overlaying tracks of percussion. I rewrote most of the lyrics while retaining much of the original theme. While the final result doesn’t make me love this particular song a whole lot more than I already did, it seems to please plenty of other people that have heard it. And I can live with that.
Several years after I made the final recording of ‘Things That You Do’, we handed the song off to Canadian record producer, Darryl Neudorf for a shiny, new remix and master. You can hear the difference between my original mix in the audio above the photos at the top of the left column, and Darryl’s mix at the top center of this page. His mix was the version used for the animated music video as well.
Studio Track Sheet
Early music vlog with lyrics for ‘Things That You Do’ with my original audio mix. The video includes lots of shots of my band, Working Class Hussys and our fans during what was a very busy year of gigging.
Thank you to ‘Think.’ for animating our music video. Below are some still shots. Enjoy!
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