Just Alright
The way I describe this song is to say that everybody around me seems as if they are looking for something or trying towards something that they don't seem to ever get. I had to wait a whole year after feeling the concept for this song before I actually managed to write it in summer 2005... It's about The Coffee Den. Well, the people there. There were a couple people there who "just seem[ed] so sad" (as my Imaginative Writing teacher used to say about me). I think the two people who were the initial inspiration for the song were Leah Karst and Liz Bricker. Whether they were actually feeling this way I haven't a clue, but that's what it seemed like, at least. I'm not that great at reading people, though. Regardless, I think Just Alright is about all of us here in Mt. Lebanon and maybe across the world. It's a pretty existential song, kind of an "I dreamt I was happy" from Waiting For Godot, where in the end we're all just depressed and defeated, chasing our dreams with no logical likelihood of succeeding. We're all here for the same thing: to find happiness. I guess Just Alright paints The Coffee Den as a haven for lost souls, where you can achieve a beautiful stasis; nothing changes but everything seems pretty cool for a little while. I feel strongly for the atmosphere of The Coffee Den.
This was the song that convinced Jesse Hanson to record & produce my album Vanity Ain't Fair. Oh, and many kudos to Bobbie Townsend for suggesting Just Alright as the title for the song... it is totally essential to the song's message. I would have named it something silly like "Coffee Assisted Lament" or "For That Sad Girl" (those were the two names I was using prior to the song's final naming). Also everybody "in the know" (which so far is only one person in the world, Scott Donoughe) refers to this song as "Georgia Company" since that was the name it was given when it made its world debut at the Den during The Crunge Unplugged.
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