The story behind the song “Old Men” begins in a strange bed.
I was visiting Atlanta and crashing at my friend Wade Watkins’. In the morning, over coffee in the kitchen, he asked how I slept, and I said, “Old men don’t sleep well in strange beds.”
To which he chuckled and said, “That’s a song.”
So when I returned to Tybee I wrote “Old Men.”
From the craft of songwriting aspect, it is one of my favorites.
It is also one of those songs I can point to and say, if there aren’t muses, if creativity isn’t partly spiritual or psychic, then the sun doesn’t shine and the earth is flat.
What I mean by that is I have no idea where the line “when closing your eyes is an act of faith” came from. But it perfectly completes the thought and says something new about being old:
Old men, they say, don’t sleep well in strange beds
When closing your eyes is an act of faith.
I also like this song for its economy: 2½ verses and a chorus.
And I particularly like it that the two main verses express such disparate notions, yet the chorus ties them together so well.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is keeping the redundancy at bay. In other words, repeating the same idea in slightly different words and phrases that add nothing more than space or filler to the song.
“when closing your eyes is an act of faith.”
I first performed this song without its third verse, but the strong reaction to the line: “When closing your eyes is an act of faith” convinced me it was strong enough to withstand being repeated. And in fact, needed to be repeated. (This is not redundancy, in my book, as it’s not re-worded in a weakened phrase and it is being repeated for emphasis, not to fill up space.)
Also, by re-writing the second half of that verse, it created a totally different thought than the original verse. And clarifies that sleeping in strange beds had nothing to do with sleeping with another person, by asserting it was “time to come in from the cold. “
“Old Men” also allowed me to make a subtle social commentary and use one of my favorite, though not original, expressions of the unleveled playing field out there: “heads they win; tails we lose.”
To read the story behind “Hotter than the 4th of July” click here.
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I would love to follow your music and you. Going back such a long way with the Oliver’s I feel a strange relationship with each of you,
Ken Ross