Liner Notes for a Kiss That Lasted One Chorus

Format: seven-inch single, A-side only. Running time: three minutes and nine seconds, of which the kiss accounts for roughly twenty. Producer's note: the best things on this record happen at the hook, and the hook is over before anyone has time to be sensible about it.

It started somewhere in the second verse, the part of every song where you think you know where it's going. We were laughing at something not worth repeating, standing too close to a speaker that was doing its best to ruin our conversation. Then the chorus lifted, the way a good chorus does, like somebody opened a window in a stuffy room, and you stopped mid-sentence.

It started somewhere in the second verse, the part of every song where you think you know where it's going.

Technically it was a perfect edit. No fumbling, no false starts, just two people deciding at the same instant and landing on the same downbeat. I remember a trumpet somewhere in the mix, which might have been the song and might have been my blood. The memory has been remastered so many times I can no longer find the original tape.

And then, the fade. Not a dramatic one. Someone shouted my name from the booth, a cable needed swapping, the night collected us and moved us along. We did not talk about it. That's the part that haunts the liner notes: all that sound compressed into one chorus, and nothing recorded in the bridge where we might have said what it meant.

I keep the single in a sleeve near the front of the crate, easy to reach. Some tracks are short because they're meant to be, and some are short because the band got interrupted. I suspect I know which kind this is. If you want to hear how I'd extend the mix, I keep a longer version going on TheFriend, one bar at a time.