#4: You’ve Got Her Number February 26th, 2006
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A couple weeks ago, I sat down to work on a song called “Compromise” which I’ve never quite been satisfied with since I wrote it in 2002. I normally wouldn’t have even dragged it out except that I was getting nervous about my writing not being able to keep pace with SFoT, and I thought that maybe I could buy some time by dusting off songs from the reject pile, seeing about fixing the most cringeworthy bits, and then passing them off as new, without, you know, actually having to write entirely new ones.
Hah.
And there are about fourteen pages in my lyrics notebook to document the process by which “Compromise” then became “You’ve Got Her Number”, but still, damned if I understand how it happened. The only words they have in common are “reach for the phone”. It’s not like I’ve ever really set out to write a new song, but this time I was actually trying to do something else and the song happened in spite of it. They’re incorrigible like that. I think that at some point I must’ve just realized that the new stuff I was writing was being dragged down by the old stuff, and that there was enough there for a story in its own right.
It started out in the first person, but someone I showed the lyrics to felt that “How many rings will each of us wait?” didn’t make sense, ’cause why would the other person wait — wasn’t the singer supposed to be the screwed-up one? I’d been trying to convey that maybe both participants were a little screwed up, and that they could play on each other’s neuroses by doing things as minor as (not) answering the phone. I think that giving the narrator some distance from the two of them might make that idea more supposable for the listener, but I’m not sure it hits quite as hard, this way.
Jury’s out. And so am I — except to say that this week, by Will’s request, we recorded piano first and vocal second. I was really hesitant to do this ’cause I thought the songs would lose the immediacy that comes from laying down everything at once. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. It turns out that the only thing we lost was crap singing and playing. Thanks.
You’ve got her number
You reach for the phone
You might be reckless –
but she might be home
You shouldn’t care
as much as you do
Should have a way out
In case you can’t get throughHow many rings
will each of you wait?
And suppose she picks up –
Just what do you think
that you’re gonna say?
You shouldn’t be nervous
Should have other plans
But you’ve got her number
You’ve got it bad
At 1:38 am on February 26th, 2006, unbottled soul wrote:
SFoT #4: You’ve Got Her Number…
With the posting of Shoebox Full of Tapes number 4: You’ve Got Her Number my Lindsey Kuper collection has officially doubled (yay! And now we’re headed for it tripling!). This song, though (the phrase begs to be used) distressingly short, features …
At 1:53 pm on February 26th, 2006, Will wrote:
I like the last two lines, but I can’t decide… Is the pun intentional?
And thanks for trying out separate recordings. It sounds so good!
At 3:08 pm on February 27th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Will –
I, um, uh…it depends which pun you mean. Help me out…
At 4:49 pm on February 27th, 2006, Will wrote:
“You’ve got her number” as in the phrase “I’ve got your number”? Like, “you know what she’s up to.”
I guess not. :)
At 6:35 pm on February 27th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Yeah, not so much, although that might fit. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure that was what it meant, although I knew that it was a phrase.
I wonder where it comes from? Military slang? I assume it predates the movie…
At 4:04 pm on March 3rd, 2006, Maya wrote:
Heh . . . this one is not at ALL what I thought it would be like from the lyrics you emailed me a while back. I kinda heard something Fountains-0f-Wayne-esque in my head. You know, “It must be summer/’Cause the days are long/And I dial your number/But you’re gone, gone gone.” Weird, eh?
At 4:07 pm on March 3rd, 2006, Maya wrote:
Oh yeah, and also, I love “Compromise” and would be sad to see it go the way of the dinosaur.
At 4:40 pm on March 3rd, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Not weird at all. Actually, I think that this song does owe something to “It Must Be Summer”, with the clipped phrases and the phone thing and the way that the first line and the second-to-last line are the same.
One of these weeks I’ll dig up an old “Compromise” and put it up. I kind of like how I sang it, even if I don’t really like what I sang.
At 4:09 pm on March 5th, 2006, Lishan wrote:
I’m a big fan of the last two lines especially– I’ve always loved that kind of shift in meaning.
At 7:26 pm on March 5th, 2006, Lindsey wrote:
Thanks, I’m glad you like that. I’m kind of trying to parallel what’s going on in the third and fourth lines, with the different shades of meaning of the verb and all.
I kind of wish I had enunciated better at the end, because people hear it and are all, “You’ve got what? You’ve got it what?” But I didn’t want to beat anyone over the head with the play on words, so I kinda mumbled them.
*rolls eyes* I don’t overthink this stuff at all, ever.
At 1:21 pm on March 8th, 2006, unbottled soul » Blog Archive » titles are not titillating wrote:
[…] Edit 15:19: I have one shoe on, stopped to blog about listening to Lindsey Kuper. […]
At 7:16 pm on March 19th, 2006, Shoebox Full of Tapes » #7: Compromise wrote:
[…] This is one of those old songs that won’t go away. It’s the song that “You’ve Got Her Number” grew out of; it’s here for historical reasons, I guess, and because Maya said she liked it. […]
At 10:47 pm on June 11th, 2006, Shoebox Full of Tapes » #17: You’ve Got Her Number wrote:
[…] Now then. SFoT went on vacation last week while I was running a marathon, but this week we’re back with more rehearsal tapeage. I think this must’ve been the second or third time that we’d ever tried to play this song. There are a few other takes from the same night (all bad in completely different ways), but I won’t subject you to the rest of them. I did, however, leave some stuff at either end of the clip so that you can experience for yourself how incredibly glamorous it is to be in our band. Lyrics. Also, if the file size seems really small for both this and #16, it’s because they’re in mono, ’cause we can’t seem to get GarageBand to bounce a stereo file. Us very professional. […]