Don't start me talking I could talk all night My mind goes sleepwalking While I'm putting the world to right. - Elvis Costello

He's such a drag
He's not insane
It's just that everybody
Has to feel his pain.

I didn’t know anything then about odd-metered bars of music, but as Burt told me years later, you don’t count those beats, you just feel them and the tension that they create.

My first lyric departed directly from Mingus’s title “This Subdues My Passion.” If you didn’t think the song was already half written after that title, then you had no business dallying with the tune in the first place. I wrote about the way that music tempers the violence within a man. This subdues my passion And it may control my rage It may stem the poison that spills out onto the page