Forever Ago

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This song will also be online in the usual places like Spotify & iTunes.

Song Lyric

There’s a photograph glued to a page
Frozen in time and defying its age
And I’m laughin’ at nothin’
And pushin’ your swing
Was I ever so sure of anything

Forever ago
It’s been such a long time
But not long enough
To make you all mine
But too long to believe
That we could ever be so
Forever ago

So we leave our forevers behind
For some dumb young couple to find
And play with like babies so safe
In the arms of a lie
Doesn’t that sound just like you and I

Forever ago
It’s been such a long time
But not long enough
To make you all mine
But too long to believe
That we could ever be so
Forever ago
Forever ago

© DNR Records / Tom Acousti 2001 “all rights reserved”

About the Song

The opening line of this song hung around on a hotel napkin for a long while. When I finally tried singing it with a piano underneath, that single first line informed the rest of the song’s lyric, which is very simple… and so, too, the music. It wrote itself, fast.

I was feeling my own aging while writing this… becoming old enough to have memories so old that they can’t be trusted. Did this or that ever happen? Is there any amount of “time” that could reverse this or that?

The aging theme is also built in by way of that first line too. “There’s a photograph glued to a page.” Photos on paper? THAT was FORVER AGO. For the youngsters listening: Long ago, we had these things called photographs that people would glue to the pages of a big book called a photo album. You couldn’t search it. You couldn’t sort. You just sat on the couch every few years and endured going through it.

About the Recording

This song was one of a dozen songs slated for the Bloom, Volume II album which was incomplete and shelved for years. Those recordings all went down in “the east” of Nashville in our very DIY studio. Kevin Teel (guitar), and I were partway into putting basic tracks down for this one. Pete Vitalone had flown in from NYC to do some keyboards.

To begin, Teel played a rhythm by tapping on his acoustic guitar and we used that as a loop. When I started playing piano with it, we could tell the loop was just right. This would be easy. He picked up his electric, and within minutes the demo vibe was set.

We tracked it only days after it was written. To keep the live energy in the studio, Pete played a scratch piano that I would later replace, giving me the opportunity to focus only on the singing while recording.

Shortly after that, Scotty Huff created a beautiful horn arrangement for it. I knew Scotty, as he had been well known in Maine for his talents before moving to Nashville, where he became VERY WELL known for guitar, composing, and music production too. Visit his site. He’s an incredible talent.

Even after we mixed the horns in, it would be years before DNR finished it for release with replaced vocals, drums, bass, and top-secret sweetening all recorded here at Ground Floor, Freeport.