I've finally cleaned up my apartment. A little needling from my sister, a little needling from my friend Mike, and it finally gelled into a plan.

Maybe it sounds funny to describe cleaning my home as "empowering", but that's how it was. When you've lived messy as long as I have, you get to believe that you'll never get things neat. Making my place look nice gives me a real charge.

But I had a mess for a very long time, and I can still relate to "the mess lifestyle". A friend of mine kept talking about her messy room, and I joked that a bunch of us should get together and write a song about our messy spaces. No one else seemed to want to write it, so I decided to write it myself.

It was about time for a silly song anyway, and I thought I'd better do it before my mess credibility ran out. Of course, now the problem is that people might think my place really is messy.

This song's kinda country, certanly upbeat, but you wouldn't think so from the first time I played it. Dominic was playing along and he noticed the chords looked pretty reggae, so that's how we did it, me, Dom, Sarah Ternoway and Ilia. It was the first time I'd ever played a reggae song on stage!

The chords seem pretty much like my standard chords to me, though some people seem to think they sound different. Maybe I stole a bit from Timothy Cameron (namely the bit from "Should Be So Easy" to the the line "his obsession swallowing you whole").

The verse is A/B/A/B, with nine syllables for the A and eight for the B. The chorus is A1/A2/C/A1/A2/C, with four syllables for A1, seven syllables for A2, and ten or eleven syllables for C. (What's a syllable between friends?)

These days it does seem as if I'm writing away from poetry conventions what with uneven numbers of syllables and strange emphasis.

Structurally, this is your standard setup-- Verse / Chorus / Verse / Chorus / Verse / Chorus / Chorus. The last chorus has different lyrics, but the same rhymes.

And there are some stops in the song. I play G / D / C as three rapid strokes, after the A1 in the chorus.

Vocally, the song's just barely between the low and high boundaries of my range. I really should stop writing songs that I can't sing!

Questions, comments or suggestions about this web site? Email me at aaron.bentley@utoronto.ca