One Way Ticket (Live)

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Between January and June in 2007, The 13th Floor had a monthly Saturday night gig at the now-closed Royal Mile Pub in Wheaton, MD.  What's The 13th Floor, you ask?  Well, I have played a lot of music over the years with Dan, one of my best friends, and his wife Christina, also a very good friend.  Back in late 2006 we had been trying to get a gig for some time, and Dan and I had fallen into the pattern of planning to talk about thinking about collaborating perhaps regarding the possibility of the chance of promoting ourselves.  We were decent at the music, but we stunk when it came to getting our act together.  

Well, long story short, a series of chance encounters led to us landing this gig at the Royal Mile.  When we went there one night to talk to the manager about this, we realized that we didn't have a name.  We had recently been playing the Gram Parsons song "Sin City" quite a bit...that's the one with the line "On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door won't keep out the Lord's burning rain..."  So, we decided we would be called The 31st Floor, thinking we'd be so cool being named after an obscure song reference.  Well, a few days go by, and we noticed that the Royal Mile put us on their website calendar as The 13th Floor.  Well, that was that.

Those five or six months of playing music there with Dan and Christina were among the most fun music-related experiences I've ever had.  The only reason it ended was that I moved to Chicago.

We have a few recordings from those gigs lying around somewhere.  Here's one I dug up.

We played covers almost exclusively, but this must have been late in the night during one of those gigs.  At least it seems that way judging from the way I sound and the faint smattering of applause.  Looking back on it, this seems to be the prequel to "Rolling on Steel."  I'll warn you, it's bleak.  But the cool thing about art is that it allows you to appreciate the strange beauty of what's, well, bleak.

"One Way Ticket"

Instrumentation: guitar (Live at the Royal Mile Pub in Wheaton, MD...May or June 2007)

When your house is just the place where you usually sleep

When there's nothing you can call your own that you can keep

When the shallow waters suck you in as if they were too deep

One way ticket on the first train out

And I ain't gonna miss it, and I ain't got no doubt

When coffee is your energy and the bottle your friend

When there's nothing but a whole bunch of nothing around the bend

When the safety of your solitude is all the days can lend

One way ticket...

When the same old road leads to the same old places

When you envy the guy in the subway with the suitcases

When you no longer care to match the names with the faces

One way ticket...

When the alarm clock sounds too often without warning

When the pillow seems to hurt too much in the morning

When the only time you notice the weather is when it's pouring

One way ticket...

When the flames no longer dance in your lover's eyes

When time's a bad magician offering no surprise

When the hour and minute hands dress you in a worn-out disguise

One way ticket...