"Sex Without Bodies" was written over a period of three days in November '87. I'd just moved back into New York after a 7-year self-imposed exile and had just started writing songs a year or two prior to that. I had yet to perform any of them publicly. This was one of the first two songs I ever played in front of an audience--at an open-mic night at a hole called the Speakeasy (on MacDougall Street)--the other song being "Nadine." I had to follow a guy who sang "No Woman, No Cry" while he walked across tables in the audience. I wasn't booed off the stage, so I continued to come back, week after week after week. Virtually every friend and associate I have today came directly or indirectly from that club. The song "Sex Without Bodies" was, sad to say, simply the story of my life at that time.

"Spasm"

"Spasm" is one of the first songs I wrote after Kelly and I started working together as "Dave's True Story" and is notable for being the first song I wrote specifically for Kelly to sing. Before DTS, most of my songs had been written from a male or neutral point-of-view and we either made minor changes to account for the gender switch or let Kelly sing it in the role of a man. "Spasm," however, had a number of lines in it that skewed it toward a woman's point of view. I think it only took a couple of days to write but it took me months before I realized, with horror, that I had lifted the central phrase "It's just a spasm" clean out of a Donald Fagen song.

"This Christmas"

"This Christmas" was written during the Gulf War. I guess that puts it around December of '90 or '91. I had just been playing some chords(as I usually do) when a couple of them sounded kind of Christmassy, so I just followed through on that. The war gave me the theme of separation that pervades the song. When asked about it, I usually say that writing a Christmas song is a sort of rite-of-passage for a Jewish songwriter. But that's hindsight. The song just happened, without forethought.

"Crazy Eyes"

Years ago, I bought on some sort of strange whim, a back-issue of Life magazine from 1947. One of the articles dealt with heterochromia, a condition where the color of one eye differs from the other. There was even a picture of a cute blonde staring up at the reader with a blue eye and a green eye. I became intrigued: there was a strange poetry to it, or something. I was just out of school, attempting to write a novel at the time and wound up giving one of the characters the condition. The article had given the odds of having heterochromia at 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10,000 but I don't remember ever running across anyone in real life with it before or since. The novel never got written. The song "Crazy Eyes" is all that remains of that small, peculiar obsession.

"Sequined Mermaid Dress"

About seven or eight years ago I took up ballroom dancing. There was a very attractive girl there who could dance really well. We kind of hit it off, but she had two very open agendas: first, she'd been badly burned by her boyfriend of seven years; second, her biological clock was raging. I had my own agenda: I was a guy just trying to keep it on the nice-and-easy. About that time, a friend of mine, Alex, signed up for a couple of classes. Before we knew what hit us, she's playing the two of us against each other like the born fools we were. Then one day, suddenly, she wouldn't have anything to do with either of us.

Shortly thereafter, at a party the dance school threw every week, she showed up dressed to kill: a tight-fitting number covered with shiny, overlapping disks that reminded Alex of the scales of a fish. He dubbed the dress a "mermaid" dress. Straight guys who take ballroom dancing belong to their own special category of geekdom. Here was this smashing girl ready to spawn, trolling a pool of guppies Crazy!

I wound up losing the girl but got the song. Some consolation.