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It's because you love me.

jonathoncomfortreed

Published: Jun 24, 2011

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Project 52, week 20
^{[my theme]}
The song: Colly Strings (view the music video here)
The lyrics:

Take a leaf of paper and draw your mind,
Your bourbon brown that can burn my eyes,
I lost your presence underneath the bridge

Lock the door, let's talk it out,
Against the wall, hands on my mouth,
Could this be it, is it really over now?

You wore a pink t-shirt and khaki pants,
You played your songs and danced your dance,
I unwrapped your presents underneath your feet

Nine to eleven you're getting weak,
The tile is cold, I can barely speak,
And I think she's gone, but I'll be sure for safety's keeping

If you say no, then no it will be,
I'll stick it at our skin, pierced with colly strings,
Just play it cool yeah, and try avoid being seen

I'll stick it at our skin, pierced for nothing

Well yeah I saw inside the mirror and your smoking gun,
Along in the sign, the hours, the subscribing one by one,
And I fell so fast in Seth Ott's bedroom,

You said you saw it coming but you didn't see nothing,
Your eyes are on the living room your eyes are on the closet,
Don't worry about, don't worry about anything

A pity invitation to an awkward house,
For pseudo-boy who would rather wear a blouse,
I sincerely saw your skin for the very first time

My curly hair and a voting booth,
Confessingly, this is the first time I've loved you,
And God I mean, God I mean it, I hope that I mean it

'Cause like dying young, idols got the best of me,
Well don't stop calling, you're the reason I love losing sleep,
And the building collapse, we'll shop one for something

I'll stick it at our skin, pierced for something

Besides, don't release me until it's over
And besides, you can't believe without fear
And besides, you can't believe without fear

The inspiration: I've always been fascinated with this song. I love to just sit still and listen closely to the lyrics and melody, trying to absorb the meaning of the song. Maybe what I love so much about it is that I really don't understand it in the slightest. It's like that abstract painting that you know is meaningful; it invokes an emotional reaction but you just can't figure out what it is about it that is so powerful.
Yeah, kind of like that.

You know what I'm talking about.

So I was sitting there, listening to this song when I wrote the lyrics, "Confessingly, this is the first time I've loved you," on my hand. Then, being me and ever so artistic, I started wondering how I could use photography to express how I feel about this song, and all that I could picture was the ink on my hand. In other photos, I've often tried to create the song as a scene or still life, but really the lyrics in Colly Strings just make that impossible. I'll talk more about how the ink spiral and heart pendant came to be in the section below, but it was mainly a sort of desperate attempt to express the song without having any concrete understanding of what I should be depicting.

Unrelated but still about the song lyrics, I love, "well don't stop calling, you're the reason I love losing sleep," so much. Don't you love those songs that can just perfectly describe things that you thought you were alone in feeling?

The technique: So, yeah, I looked at my hand for a bit, and then started writing more of the lyrics on my hand, getting more excited about the idea. Then I stopped and thought, well if I'm going to ink myself up like this, I better do it right. So I washed of all of the ink (as best I could – you can see faded ink on my hand in this picture if you look closely). I decided that the picture would need more of a focal point, so I found *WanderingHere's necklace. As I was playing around with the pendant in my palm, I had the idea to write in a spiral and place it in the centre.

Genius, eh? :]

I started this after dinner, so probably around 5:30 or maybe a bit later than that. This picture was taken at 11:00. That's how long it took to write the song lyrics on my hand – I was trying to be as neat as possible and also I literally covered my entire hand, right up to the fingertips. Let me tell you, by the end, I was so sick of it. Worth it in the end, I guess.