Erosion

I was recently watching an interview with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains, and he said something along the lines of, “I don’t always write songs, but I’m always compiling ideas.”

I can totally relate to this because it’s exactly the way I am with music. I’m always compiling ideas, be it riffs, melodies, or lyrics. Whenever I pick up a guitar, I come up with something and then save it on my phone. The same goes for lyrics. Whenever I’m inspired to write about something or to simply vent, I pick up a pen and paper, and I write a song to keep in my “lyric vault” (a bag I’ve had since I was a teenager that contains ALL the lyrics that I’ve written since day one). From time to time, I go back to this vault and reacquaint myself with Fadi, the young teenage, pimply kid.

“Erosion” is a song that spent a long time in my lyric vault even though, in my opinion, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

I remember one day sitting in a cafe waiting for a friend to come and have lunch with me. As I was sitting there, a bit on edge because my friend was late, I started looking around at people in the cafe to help pass the time.


First, I saw an overweight, balding man with long hair (maybe reminiscing his youth), frowning and ogling his phone with a hookah in hand, and fumes coming out of his mouth. You can clearly see the lines etched by the frown on his sweaty, balding forehead.


Next, I saw a couple (both wearing wedding rings, 👏 Sherlock Holmes), barely looking at each other, eating their food in isolation yet sharing a table. Whenever they’d look at each other, a fake smile appears. I’ve read too many books about body language to recognize a real smile from a fake one. Not to get too scientific here, but there is a muscle next to the corner of the eyes (the Orbicularis Orbiti - nerd moment here, sorry) which is responsible for real smiling. This muscle is very hard to move voluntarily, ie: when you want to fake-smile, it has to move involuntarily causing the effect of a real smile (the corners of the eyes going a little back on the side of your forehead). Body language experts can easily detect a fake smile from a real smile by the movement of this muscle and wrinkles around the eyes.

Afterward, I saw an old man, with many wrinkles on his face, arguing over the phone with someone.

I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to these four different strangers to make them so unhappy—to make their faces so eroded by the troubles of life.

Later that evening, I poured myself some red wine, and I put on a movie starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron called “At Any Place.” Toward the end of the film, there is a scene where Dennis Quaid looks at the camera so desperately and unhappily, as if he had lost it all. 


That look, coupled with the earlier events of the day and the red wine inspired me to pause the movie at Dennis’ face and write the lyrics to “Erosion.”

Then the song went into the vault for more than ten years.

I believe that we are born pure, happy, and with a clean slate. Somehow, life takes its toll on us and we manage to screw things up. Mistakes pile up. The burden becomes unbearable. We (real) smile less and frown more until age, time, and our fuck-ups completely wear us down, wrinkle our eyes, stoop our backs, and erode our faces.

Even the mightiest mountains erode with time, so what about us feeble and fragile mortals?

As I mentioned earlier, I wrote these lyrics a while back and I love them so much but, to be honest with you, they also kind of scare me. That’s probably why I waited so long to use them in a song.

I don’t want to be like those four strangers from earlier. For an ungodly moment, I saw myself in their shoes and…the world was so miserable and bleak.

I don’t want to have an everlasting frown. I don’t want to fake a smile whenever I look at my partner. I don’t want to become an angry and unhappy old man.

This is an eerie song. It’s a song that will make you feel uneasy. To me, it’s a reminder of who I DON’T want to become.