(no subject)

[helsinkibaby]

*waves from England*

Been on my own all day as Himself is at work, messing on the computer, looking at skating clips and looking at regular old tv... this morning's Picket Fences on Hallmark was the one where Littleton's brother showed up and there's a siege and back story and just wonderful acting from Don Cheadle, so that was a nice start to the day!!!

Apropos of nothing, it dawned on me that someone, in response to my American Idol comments, asked me for the story behind Gary Allan's recording of Best I Ever Had the song Bucky mumbled sang last week... cut and pasted from www.garyallan.com -


Last October Allan's path abruptly changed when his wife of three years committed suicide. "Your whole life, all your plans come to a halt," he says, "and you need to start over again. I was definitely in a place that I had never been, by a long shot, when I made this record.”

"So I had started writing again, and then when she passed writing songs became a healing process for me. All of my records are personal, but this is by far my most personal record. I have four songs on this one -- 'I Just Got Back from Hell', 'Puttin' My Memories Away', 'No Damn Good', and 'Putting My Misery on Display'. You can definitely see where I was on each of my albums, mentally. But I think this one, yeah, this one got closer to me, more inside of me, than you would normally see. Just because of all that had happened."

Allan had completed tracking four songs for what would eventually become Tough All Over; but finishing the album presented a situation unlike any he had faced. "What happened complicated working in a way that I'd never experienced," he says. "There are no love songs, for example. We had a couple -- smashes, actually. But it was like: 'Who am I singing that to, you know?' It just didn't make any sense to have those kinds of songs on my record, not this time."

What did make sense to Allan, once he returned to the studio, was to address what had happened in his music. Tough All Over is very much a collection that falls out from the moment, which happens early in the collection's lead title song, when Allan elegantly wails the line "I wish you were still here/And I say it sadly."
"I was just in total devastation,” Allan says, “but I couldn't ignore what had happened. To me, that's what country music is: It's all in the center of real life.”

There was some talk of putting out one of the many strong tracks from See If I Care, Allan's last album, from 2003, named the year's finest country CD by Blender magazine. But doing that didn't seem right to Allan.

"Because all my other records reflected so much where I was at (at that point in time), I felt like it would have been wrong to ignore the situation. I definitely thought that people should know 'Look, this happened and you're going to hear it and feel it in my songs.'" The result was Allan's recording and release of the first single, “Best I Ever Had.”


So you sailed away into a grey sky morning
Now I'm here to stay, love can be so boring
And nothing's quite the same now
I just say your name now.

But it's not so bad
You're only the best I ever had
You don't want me back
You're just the best I ever had.

So you stole my world, now I'm just a phony
Remembering the girl leaves me down and loney
Well send it in a letter
Make yourself feel better.

But it's not so bad
You're only the best I ever had
You dont want me back
You're just the best I ever had.

And it might take some time to patch me up inside
but I cant take it so I, I run away and hide
And I might find in time that you were always right
You're always right.

So you sailed away into a grey sky morning
Now, I'm here to stay, love can be so boring
Was it what you wanted?
Could it be I'm haunted?

But it's not so bad
You're only the best I ever had
You dont want me back
You're just the best I ever had.

You're just the best I ever had