At the time, I was listening to a lot of Erykah Badu, and I wanted the first lines of the song to have some of the power of the first lines of Badu’s song, “Tyrone” - I’m gettin’ tired of your shit, you don’t never buy me nothin’. I remember the night I was writing “Like A Lady”: I had worked all day (all week, all month, all year, so on) at the University in the lonely little job that I disliked but needed to pay the lion’s share of our bills - I’ve been nothing but your paycheque - while Mike was in Toronto with the band - you’ve been living it up in the city, you left me here, working the grind. I’m not sure exactly how Mike finally heard the song in its entirety, but I know that when he did, it was when The Walkervilles were in the rear-view mirror, and he had no love lost about the version of him I was addressing in my song. Kev Kavanaugh, who photographed me several times around the release of Little Sway, was at the show and said to me, “You’ve never played that song before? You’ve GOT to play it.” At the show, I played it with that kind of electric anxious thrill that comes from pulling something off for the first time. I decided to take a chance and unveil “Like A Lady”. Luckily, time passed, things changed, and “Like A Lady” wasn’t so hurtful anymore.įast forward four years, and I’m putting together a set list for a show celebrating International Women’s Day. Alternatively, you can commit to your savage words and wound people for so long as they care to remember that your song exists. Sometimes, that writing is just experience, just ephemeral.
#ERYKAH BADU TYRONE SONG MEANINGS TRIAL#
Unfortunately, you sometimes learn this through trial and error. As a writer, you learn the boundaries of what you can and can’t say about the people around you. I resigned myself to burying “Like A Lady” there is no song that is worth more than he is, no matter how I felt when I was writing it. I once tried to play it for Mike, and couldn’t get past the first lines because of the utterly crushed look on his face. I think Adam thought I was crazy for suggesting we introduce a new song in the home stretch of production (rightly so), and FACTOR wouldn’t allow me to deliver any less than the number of songs I had outlined in my grant application or else repay a huge chunk of my grant, so Little Sway was released with all originally proposed songs intact, and without “Like A Lady”. At that time, there were a few songs on Little Sway that I wasn’t in love with, and I wanted to cut or replace them. I brought this song to Adam Rideout-Arkell when we were recording Little Sway, which means that this tune was written in the summer of 2013.