Depression
Coming down on me
Like a breaker in the surf tearing away at the shore
Depression
Just won’t let me be
The sun doesn’t wanna shine on me anymore
I’m caught in a whirlpool going round and round
The tide pulls me under and I’m gonna drown
No one to stop me from going down
Can’t even try to show my face in town, it’s nothing but
Depression
Coming down on me
I’m like debris in the gutter swept away by a heavy downpour
Depression
Looking like a fool
Going mad like a dog in the street in the heat of the day
Dejection
Never seems to cool
I try to talk it over, but I don’t know what to say
Keep on going though I’m about to fall
Destiny leads me nowhere at all
My existence is forced up against the wall
Nobody answers when I make my call, it’s nothing but
Rejection
Made to look like a fool
She threw me out of her life in the very worst way
Progression
Time is moving slow
The minutes pass like hours and my mind is flying in space
Expression
There’s no way to show
Lost my power to speak and you can’t read nothing on my face
I’m locked in a room with nothing to do
When’s it all gonna stop? I wish I knew
Can’t hold myself down just to see it through
Should I end it all now? Yes, I’m going to, it’s nothing but
Depression
There’s nowhere to go
No sanctuary anywhere once you leave this place
Depression
©2023 The Hesh Inc.
Far from being a song about clinical depression, this is my teen-angst anthem, written during the throes of final-exam season in my senior year of high school and recorded about half a year later. It was my first serious attempt at tackling a subject other than relationships. I composed it on a Casio CT-202 in the TV lounge of my high-school dorm in Jerusalem, which had the best acoustics in the building and I could fool myself into thinking the Casio could produce a sound that approximated a Hammond organ. (It would be another year and a half before I would record with an actual Hammond for the first time.) I recorded a rough version of it on a boombox in that room, and when I played it back at home awhile later, my mother heard it and said she liked it enough to give me a few bucks so I could record it professionally in a studio. With that cash in hand, I went to Jerusalem Recording Studio, in the Bet Hakerem neighborhood of the city not far from my old high-school campus, owned by one Avi Yaffe and scene of my first-ever recording sessions over the previous year and a half. I tracked about half-a-dozen sounds from the Casio, enlisted friend-of-a-friend Jeff Schiff to play drums during the song's coda, and then overdubbed vocals. The result was an overwrought, overly melodramatic stab at wannabe-prog-rock that seemed to scare away everyone who listened to it. But I was proud of it, at least at the time.
I still have the master cassette of the song, and somewhere I may even have a digital version, but rather than try to dredge that up and make it available online, I believe I'd rather re-record it with a proper Hammond organ and perhaps even a full band behind me. Imagine that, releasing my teen-angst anthem in my middle age. But stranger things have happened. That's rock'n'roll.