Chris Reali

I wrote the first lyric for what would become “Tears and Goodbyes” in November 2018: “This is no love song, it’s an IOU for all the pain and heartache you put me through.” The original chord changes and melody for this line were completely different than what eventually got recorded. (That song became “For Every Broken Heart,” finished around this same time, but still “in the vault,” as they say.) Almost a year later, I came up with “damn all your reasons, damn all your lies, ain’t nothin’ left to say but goodbye.” At this point, August 2019, I envisioned these two lines as some type of chorus. On September 23, 2019 I wrote the lyric that became the chorus for “T&G,” “I don’t really care what you have to say…,” and recorded a voice memo that sketched out the melody, chord changes, and hints of the guitar riff. A few days later I typed some of the lyrics into a Word doc., which explains why my sketchbook doesn’t contain the complete text of the song. Then the unfinished song sat for another few weeks. I returned to the lyric in mid-October, finishing the second verse and bridge. By this time the song was in 12/8 time, and on October 25 I recorded a solo acoustic demo that sounds very much like the released version. In April 2020, about a month after the basic tracks were recorded at the Les Paul Studio in Mahwah, NJ, I started working on the pedal steel parts at home (this is during the early days of the pandemic, remember?), but it took me some time to figure out what to play. Near the end of that month, most of the tracks for the song had been recorded, although I went back a couple of times to redo a few parts. The lyric for “Tears and Goodbyes” took nearly a year to complete. The creative process is funny. Sometimes the words and ideas just pour right out, and other times they need a little more time to develop.