Gaslight
A song for...well, we all know what we saw
Among the most pernicious political and social trends of the past four or five years is the widespread gaslighting perpetuated by those with a far-right political agenda. (Yeah, we’re goin’ there.) This trend is presently at its apex with the Derek Chauvin trial.
The political platform is white supremacy. That’s it, that’s the entire platform. The GOP wholesale abandoned any semblance of the political and moral values it portends to espouse, trading it all in for naked power as they followed Trump into a toxic sinkhole of white supremacy.
Yet the whole time, they kept pretending that’s not what they were doing, even as it became more and more and more obvious. The lasting legacy of Trumpism, ironically, will be the mass unmasking of the intense racism in the GOP particularly and in the country as a whole.
You know exactly what I’m talking about (even if you try to gaslight me by dodging the issue), but the Chauvin trial shows it all so perfectly. The Right lost its collective shit when Colin Kaepernick quietly took a knee to protest police killing Black people. They knew what he was trying to say, but they lied and made it about “disrespecting the flag.”
These are the sort of people who have convinced themselves that this makes sense:
Person: Black lives matter!
Them: No, allllll lives matter.
[pause]
Them: ...blue lives matter.
But—irony of ironies, I mean the optics are too on-the-nose—Chauvin the cop put his own knee down and executed George Floyd, with impunity, in broad daylight, on video. This trial should take all of five minutes. Because we all know what we saw.
We all know what Kaep was trying to say, and we all know what Chauvin was trying to say. We all know who they are and what they’re about.
Based on my own interactions with people in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, I am convinced that those who bought into Trumpism early on and stuck with it just have dark spots on their brains now. Each time he drew a new line and dared them to cross it, they had to kill off a part of themselves to justify doing so. After years of this, by the time the 2020 election came around (and it was so clearly just a referendum on hate), I couldn’t get any of those people in my social media circles to agree with me on this: “Just say you’re against white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, and bigotry. Let’s start from there.” None of them would. I think it’s because, at that point, they literally couldn’t.
ALSO: I have zero patience for the “but but but both sides” people. Just don’t. You know what this is. You know what “both sides” mean. One side is white supremacy. You don’t get to hang out in the middle of that.
All of this was on my mind when I wrote this song.
Lyrics
Cut the crap, and shut off your gaslight. We’re not confused, we can see in the dark. We know exactly what you mean by your remarks.
We all know what we saw. We all know who you are.
We're all impressed by your mental gymnastics. Your flips and spins are tumbling all around the world. The dark spot on your brain grows wider with every line you cross. Until you can't remember what you've lost.
We all know what we saw. We all know who you are.
They say it's a crime to demand that they value your life. They say it's you who divides, but it's you who puts your body on the line.
We all know what we saw. We all know who you are.
Come and sit, 'round the warmth of the gaslight. Makes you feel safe, untroubled by the horrors they commit. They go on and on and on, but you say both sides need to quit. Either way you'll be staying out of it.
We all know what we saw. We all know who you are.
Take a stand by putting your knee down. To protect life or to take one away. Either way we know what you were trying to say.
We all know what we saw. We all know who you are.
For the music nerds
The first bit that I wrote is the refrain: We all know what we saw. We all know who you are. The second line I wrote is the first line of the song: Cut the crap. Together, that’s pretty much the whole message in a nutshell. The rest of the lyrics qualify and unpack that idea.
Some of the lyrics just kind of tumbled out, which is always nice. I wrote four of the five verses in one or two sittings, if memory serves. The last one I wrote—the middle one—didn’t come for several days.
Musically, I wanted that refrain to hearken back to a classic sort of group sing, stompin’, almost call-and-response idea. In my head I heard everyone singing that together. We all know… to kind of reclaim the truth that gaslighters try to take. The chord movement is a straightforward IV-I amen. (Every “amen” you’ve ever sung in church or in a choir boils down to that same IV-I chord movement. “Amen” means “so be it.” Here, it’s musically a way to put a strong stamp on the We all know statement. It leaves no question.)
The chord progressions in the verses came quickly. I found the opening two chords for it—F to Am7—right away on the piano, and I liked how it sounded, with the G and A notes on the top of the Am7 chord stack. The rest of the chords organically fell into place from there.
I’ve been experimenting with different ways of structuring songs, rather than just relying on the ‘ol verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format. A lot of it has to do with riffing or sketching on some melodic or harmonic idea, and gradually building it out over the course of multiple sections. In this song, the full-length chord progression of the verse is F - Am7 - Bb - C - Dm7 - Bb - Gm7 - Am - Bb - Gm7 - Dm - C - Gm7 - Bb - F.
But in the first verse (and last verse), we get a truncated version of that: F - Am7 - Bb - C - Dm7 - Bb - C - Gm7 - Bb - F.
So that main verse idea builds on itself. Then, at the end of the second verse, we pivot to something different entirely. I bring back the chords from the long introduction here. The harmonic contrast from the regular verses is important, because I switch from barking at the gaslighters to speaking a word of support to those who have been gaslighted:
They say it's a crime to demand that they value your life. They say it's you who divides, but it's you who puts your body on the line.
We all know who I’m talking about.
And then after that verse (with new chords), I bring back the words of the refrain, but with a different harmonic structure—a stronger, more upbeat IV-V-I progression instead of the IV-I.
So back to this idea of sketching and building: By the end of that newly harmonized chorus, we’re more than halfway through the song, and it’s just now that we’ve heard all the musical parts and pieces of it. Not a single intro, verse, or chorus has been exactly the same. But now we’ve established all of it, and so we can play with it for the rest of the piece.
For “Gaslight,” I did (almost) a palindromic structure. If you think of the sections not as intros, verses, or choruses, but as musical sections, the structure is basically:
A (intro)
B1 (verse)
C1 (chorus)
B2
C2
A
C3
B2
C1
B1
C2
C3
A
The A section anchors everything—intro, middle verse, outro—and the verses and refrains grow and shrink as the song ebbs and flows. I broke the rigidity of the structure in favor of a humdinger of a long refrain. (An underrated rule of composition, kids: Find a structure and play with it, but don’t religiously adhere to it—structure is a means to a musical end, not an end itself.)
I wrote this on the piano, and it really doesn’t work on the guitar for some reason, so I recorded it on the piano, too. And I put a simple supporting electric bass line underneath to give the low end some juice.
I had some bigger ideas for percussion, but I stopped short with what I ended up doing: snaps, claps, and stomps. I wanted it to feel like there were a bunch of people in the room, so I put on my heavy work boots and overdubbed myself snapping, clapping, and stomping at different positions around the mic to create a sense of space.
There’s more I think I could/would do in terms of orchestration—like, there’s no solo or lead instrument, and it feels like there should be one, but I don’t hear anything, so I left it out. But what I did here makes sense for now. And also, less is generally more when it comes to orchestrating. As a rule, don’t put in anything that doesn’t need to be there.
Maybe I’ll revisit this in another more polished and fleshed-out recording later. But for now, this says what I was trying to say.