Cotton candy lie under a cotton candy sky. Cotton candy tongue turns cut & stinging gums. I thought I'd learn by now, but here's to doing it twice *clink*. I'm a vigilante, twilight lover who never knew I had it in me. Never knew I could stomach breaking the laws I make, never knew they'd let me.
I’ve never been able to say confidently that my song My Eyes for You is a love song. Many have deemed it so. The lyrical idea for the song was inspirationally conceived by something a friend said at a time him and I were close. He had somewhat of a jealous, possessive partner. They had plans to attend one of my shows, where she and I would meet for the first time. He warned me that the way he and I saw eye to eye, and saw each other, would probably be visible to her and she might take it as a threat. He actually used the phrase “How can I hide my eyes for you? Maybe there was a time I’d try, but I wouldn’t now.”
From a musical standpoint, My Eyes for You was one of those songs that wrote itself before I knew what happened. I woke up one morning on E 59th and sat at a piano. I wrote the bulk of it right then and there. The clip you hear at the end of the song is from that voice memo – the first time the chorus melody was played.
I started to perform it live. One friend said it conveyed the emotion of two people in love, kept apart by circumstance. That was poignant. Another said it felt “ancient.” The song is filled with images of someone’s relationship. Some of them are my own memories, and some are visions of unknown origin I couldn’t unstick from my head. Ultimately, the song describes a rendezvous at The Frick, a museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The first verse about the tea kettle is an image I conceptualized for how I sometimes feel not in my body, consumed cerebrally. If I allow myself to spin about in the head space long enough, a kettle, down a hall in my soul, so-to-speak, boils over and squeals. To run to it is to return to my body, my breath, return to the taste of coffee, to the late day sun on my skin.
Six months after I wrote My Eyes for You I went to The Frick for the first time. I went alone. It felt like I was quite literally walking through my song. It had come to life, was more tangible than a dream, was in every person I saw and every inch of ground I felt beneath my feet. I set aside everything that day to go to The Frick. I remember having this feeling: even the stretch of sidewalk from the train to E 71st St felt holy.
So, I walked every allowable corridor and room. I was particularly interested in seeing a certain Vermeer, as I had just written Tethered to the Stars, a song which has a verse about being painted by Vermeer in a past life. At last, I found myself standing in front of Mistress and Maid (1667). I began to weep. I didn’t know why. It was the kind of weeping that feels like the sweeping up of shattered glass on the floor of your heart. A woman stood next to me and said “wow, look at the luster of her pearls.” I remained quiet. The word luster was in my song My Eyes for You, and I was standing in my song.
It’s a requirement of this blog that you now listen to “Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara. If nothing else, My Eyes for You is an answer to this poem. Listen, and you will see: Frank O’Hara – Having a Coke with You.
Listen to My Eyes for You: Morgan Weidinger – My Eyes for You