Love Me Like the World is Ending (demo)
“Love Me Like the World is Ending” is a song that is still in every live set I do, and I never get sick of it. It’s one of the tunes from RIPE that has aged pretty well. John Alagia did a beautiful job producing it, Sara Watkins on backing vox, and it just feels like a classic 80s/90s pop/rock tune.
I’ve met lots of younger musicians like Japanese Wallpaper and Gretta Ray who say its their favorite song of mine.
The video was kind of amazing to shoot. However I do remember a water balloon hitting me in the face and knocking out one of my contact lenses lol.
But did you know that this was actually the second version of this video we made? The first one actually got scrapped after the police shut down the shoot. The director wanted nude skateboarders coming through the shot at one point, and cops came by and did not like what they saw, so we got shut down for public indecency. Here is a scrap of footage that remains…
But the actual story of the writing of the song is kinda cool too. After “Awake is the New Sleep” I wrote about 100 little snippets of songs. I remember one lazy afternoon, my new girlfriend at the time, Ione Skye, was sitting oil painting in the sun in my old Spanish apartment in West Hollywood. Those were romantic afternoons when we just started dating. We would lay around, eat Italian food delivered from Vivoli, make out, and make art.
Anyway, this one afternoon I was hitting play on a bunch of these snippets, seeing what felt good, what didn’t, feeling these ideas out a bit, feeling them in the room.
I’ll never forget the moment I hit play on this demo, which was called “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”. Ione looked up from her painting. She said “I like this one”. But she needn’t have said anything. I felt it. The energy changes in a room when music is connecting people.
That was the moment that gave me the inspiration to finish the song. It evolved quite a bit, but the essence remained the same.
Even though the basic idea already existed, I always think of this song as being about Ione. Its about romantic intoxication and being in a state of having an insatiable crush.
Oh yeah, and I really did wear socks she left on tour.
Anyway, here’s the demo. Enjoy!