| Try, Try, Try | ||
| Band's Comments | Lyrics | |
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Billy: Hmmm...I don't know what this song's about. Honestly [chuckles].
That's the problem. Make it up? Yeah...well, I can tell you that um, we were working
on the album and uh it started to go really crazy. The album was proving to be a
little more difficult for lots of different reasons. So we um, my girlfriend and I took a
vacation to Long Island. [chuckles] I never in my life would've thought I would take a
vacation to Long Island that's all I can tell you. We're out near [?] or- James: Dude, you gotta go to Long Island more often! Billy: We were jumped by a stoner and he stole my guitar and um, but we were staying in a sort of a-- we were in the wrong hotel, I can tell you that. I mean, the closest people to our age were about 30 years older. So we were sitting out by the beach and I'm playing guitar and I started playing the riff, and I started singing like, the bullshit lyrics, "Try to hold on, try to hold on." And um, my girlfriend turned to me and said "Must every song you write be so sad?" and I said "No, it's not 'Try to hold on,'" it's like, "go ahead and try to hold on to me." [laughs] If you know what I mean. "Good luck," that's what I meant. It's more of a good luck, good luck at trying to hold on to me. Um, or anybody for that matter cos as we all know it's impossible to hold on to anybody because if you set them free, and it returns, then it was meant to be, and if it doesn't, it was meant to be free. James: Have you ever been to Long Island though? Billy: So somewhere inbetween the very obvious lines of "Try to hold on" there's these really existential lyrics which I think roughly, um, appproximate the way that I normally feel. Um, I know I'm not supposed to go on the Internet but I do occasionally [laughter and applause]...[chuckling] DON'T EVEN...please, it's so embarrasing. It's sort of that high school thing, you know, where you really wanna know what all the bad kids are saying about you. So one sort of interesting criticism that I've seen recently about the songs that I'm writing is um, people say "the songs don't seem as personal as they used to" and um, they don't seem as dramatic or emotional. And what I would say about a song like this is that I agree, but that's because I feel colder in my life. Everything that's happened to me in my life has made me feel more distant from my feelings and so when I write a song like "Try," I am expressing the way I feel, it's just people don't understand it. So, this is the cold version of me. - Transcript from VH1 Storytellers, 2000. ATN: In "Pop Tart" there's that line, "Pop Tart, what's our mission? Do we know? Do we listen?" It's almost like you're saying, 'I know the people listening to this know who I am.' They know I've fired a drummer, had a bassist leave, and I've had all these non-music life things happen. Billy: It's like being at a carnival. You can focus on the fat woman with the beard... I know and hopefully at this point you know, there's deeper rivers underneath this. As I've always said, in Pumpkinland nothing is ever as it seems. The more I seem like a goof, the more I'm playing you for a fool, and the more I seem untouchable, the more reachable I am. It's become pretty obvious over 13 years that our work has become a mirror reflecting and fucking people's perceptions. I think that's what empowers us with a certain kind of weird resonance. Because you can't crack the egg. They tried to thumb us with grunge, we were the band that flamed out — it was all going away, I burned out and lost it, even my own record company bought into the story. It's like a big fucking long play, and somehow we've managed — even when the water gets right up to here [puts hand beneath his nose] — we've managed to keep just enough above to keep the boat moving. ATN Interview, Gil Kaufman, 2000 |
Written by Billy Corgan
Pop tart | |
| Official Releases | Listen To This Song | |
| MACHINA/The Machines of God |