Tenth song off "Calendar", out on October 31st!
Artwork by Eli Wengrin
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I used to work as a substitute teacher at the high school from which I graduated. When I first started working there I never knew what to do during the lunch break, I didn’t like to leave school because the parking lot was always crowded and anywhere close by was filled with students.
Eventually I started hanging out in my former Italian teacher’s classroom, and after spending every afternoon talking to him, Serafino and I became good friends. In April I was fired (unjustly, at least from my prospective,) and it wasn’t until it was over that I realized how important my daily lunch routine had been to me. Like Joni Mitchell says, “don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” One day at lunch, Serafino told me he had seen someone dancing on TV, and was impressed by how delicately they moved, “like powdered sugar.” He then suggested I write a song based around this metaphor.
Around the same time, there was a little drama unfolding between two students. One very timid student had confessed, only to a few teachers, that they had a crush on another very outgoing and popular student of the same sex. This student was in a bit of a panic, understandably so; they were having difficulties expressing a romantic interest coupled with the identity crisis of accepting one’s own queerness all while being a shy 15 year old.

That day I wrote this song from the prospective of the shy student. Adults can sometimes write off younger people’s feelings as being childish and immature, but that seems arrogant. I feel that it would be childish not to respect and seriously consider the feelings of all the people around us.
The ideas behind the lyrics of this song were sourced from two people I knew from work, while a large part of the production and singing were done by both Luca and John from Boy Romeo.
We can’t rely on personal experience alone to navigate the world. It’s important to learn from the people around us and to let them teach us what they can.