<< 3. Two Grey Rooms is the closing song in NRH and it begins with the line 'Tomrrow is Sunday'. The Following Joni album TI begins with the song "Sunny Sunday". Sometimes it's like Joni's closing songs in her albums are an invitation for us to find out what will happen in the next Joni chapter... >>
Very cool observations, Nuri! You are a person of extraordinary insight. Further to the discussion, Lindsay Moon transcribed a TI interview that tals about the writing process and some of the story of the song. Here's the excerpt, thanks to Ms. Moon! Q. Does it take a long time? A. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the puzzles are stubborn. And sometimes too the melody will cough up really hard restrictions, and that's happened to me a couple of times. "Two Grey Rooms" on the last album, for instance, was a jam. It was one take with a live jam, and I threw on a sketch melody. I hadn't even thought of the melody. All I had was my chordal movement and instrumental piano piece and we jammed it up. So the melody that went onto tape was the birth of the melody. I very seldom capture that on tape. Usually by the time I come to tape, I've sung a wordless melody many, many times to the guitar part or the piano part. But in this case it was its birth and it came out like with vowels that were more common to French than English (sounds out) "long-dong," just the way -- well, I got attached to that and trying to find sonically the English that had those kind of vowels was difficult. And I thought at one point I'm going to have to write this in French, and my French isn't that good. That one took six or seven years. We recorded it for "Wild Things" and it came out on the last album. I finally found a story about a homosexual love story from a fellow from Fassbinder's crowd in Germany, a story of obsession, and when I read the story I think in Interview Magazine, I didn't think of it as making a song out of it, but it was a kind of a haunting story of obsession. And one day I was at the piano and singing this song again, and I suddenly realized that the modality, the romanticism of this melody and the romanticism, the overt romanticism of this unrequited love story were quite suitable to one another and I managed sonically to find -- to tell the story with the correct vowels and consonants. But I make the puzzles very hard for myself because I enjoy them that way, you know, harder than most people would care to do, that's true. " Bob NP: Clem Snide, "Joan Jett of Arc"
