Katie Holmes, Author at The Airborne Toxic Event

March 5, 2015

Innocence

The intro that was included in the Disney Hall version of the song was actually a completely different song called “Heaven is a Map.” Once I realized the two songs were in the same key, we combined them since one seemed to be like a prelude to the other.

March 5, 2015

Missy

Missy is the middle name of the person this song is about. She was from Atlanta, Georgia and she actually was with me while I wrote it, scribbling down the lyrics by hand in a small leather-bound notebook as I sung them.

March 5, 2015

Gasoline

The static sound at the top of the song is a finger being placed on a guitar chord then removed. It’s a song about my high school sweetheart, she heard it and later told me to stop telling people it was about “high school sex.” “It was more than that.” […]

March 5, 2015

Sometime Around Midnight

The song is a true story. The band playing the melancholy music was a Silver Lake scene band called Le Switch. The bar was the now-closed Safari Sam’s and the event marked the closure of Sea Level records, a former East Side staple vinyl store.

March 5, 2015

The Fifth Day

I wrote this song in a 5 day sleepwalk. I stayed up all night on the first one, watching the sun rise over Los Angeles, grabbing a guitar and just twanging out some chords. It became a snowball with strings and weird piano sounds, growing by day 5 into this […]

March 5, 2015

This Is London

This is London – We broke in the UK before the states which meant we were out playing for larger crowds in London when we were still playing small clubs in Silver Lake. It was an amazing experience. I’m an anglophile and grew listening to, and to some extent, emulating […]

March 5, 2015

All I Ever Wanted

Steven and I wrote the basic structure of this song in a hotel room in Kansas City. The words were written in the bunk of a bus in Cologne, Germany. I was reading a collection of Milan Kundera’s stories and was struck by “The Hitchhiking Game” in which a married […]

March 5, 2015

What’s In A Name

What’s In a Name – This was the first song I wrote for this record and the one that made me want to record it with producer Jacquire King. Just felt like one of those great early 80s rock songs that the Heartbreakers would do or T-Rex or Thin Lizzy […]

March 5, 2015

Changing

True story: this song was originally called “Something You Own.” It had no guitar. It sounded kind of like Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective or something with all these harmonies and a sort of “umpa” keyboard line. Then one day I pulled out a guitar and an amp, played the […]