Garcia Media Life

One Sad Sunday- Robert Garcia, Copyright 2015

As that famous existential philosopher, Neil Sadaka, once wrote, “They say that breaking up is hard to do.”  Indeed.

A break-up song!  Oh, the angst!   Oh, the suffering!  Oh, the melodrama!  I was 19 years old when I wrote One Sad Sunday back in 1975.  Who is this guy from 40 years ago?

Pretty much the same guy except I was in the throes of a romantic victim’s complex.   I got it in my head that I would be doomed for my whole entire life when it came to relationships.  It would prove to be a silly notion.  I have actually been quite lucky with love, to tell the truth.  But it made for a dramatic, tragically sad inner narrative to go along with that whole “angry young man” thing that angry young men go through.

I’m not sure I wrote this for one person or about a specific situation as much as I think it was kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of break-ups.  There’s an intimation in the first break of the song (“Traveling around has got you down”) that the life of an itinerant musician was not making the young ladies particularly happy.  I can understand.  Hell, I was never that fond of playing for drunks in bars myself.  Imagine being the girlfriend of the musician who is sitting with the drunks.

By the way, there’s a tell-tale sign of how old this song is in the second line of the first break where there is a reference to “smoky cafes.”   Yeah, people used to smoke in cafes and bars and restaurants.  You didn’t even have to go outside- you just lit up, right then and there, blew smoke all over your food and everything.  This was also known as the Paleolithic Era and after going out, we would pay our tabs and ride our dinosaurs home.

As for One Sad Sunday, Producer, Jeff Severson’s mournful, distant, electric guitars set the mood throughout this break-up ballad.   At the start of the third round of “Rowdy fights, Saturday nights,” Jeff does this syncopated electric guitar thing that’s just really cool.   He is a hep cat, that Jeff.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who say they like One Sad Sunday.  There is a certain honesty and vulnerability to it, I guess.   And the music’s pretty good.  I do this song in Open E tuning which is always fun.

My acoustic guitar on this track was not recorded in a studio.  The way Jeff and I worked, I would record to a beat into a ZOOM in my office at home, a microphone-looking device that does a pretty decent job and I’d  e-mail Jeff the digital audio files, then he would do the voodoo he does so by the time I actually was in the studio a few weeks later- all I had to do was put down my guitar and vocals- everything else would already have been completed.   One Sad Sunday was the only song where we used the actual ZOOM recording of my acoustic guitar for the final mix and I think it sounds loose and funky and that’s about right for the tenor of this tune.  The vocals were in-studio.

One Sad Sunday

By Robert Garcia

 

Rowdy fights, Saturday nights
Feeling low on Sundays
Baby baby baby baby baby
You don’t hold me like you used to
I guess we’re through
Nothing much to do
Anymore
Close the door
Forget the past
Move out fast
We’re on our way
On this Sad Sunday

Traveling around has got you down
It’s got your head spinning around
Smoky cafes, clubs and pubs
Were the many ways I let you down

Rowdy fights, Saturday nights
Feeling low on Sundays
Baby baby baby baby baby
You don’t hold me like you used to

Now we’re both blue
That much is true
Anymore
Close the door
Open your heart
Don’t fall apart
We’re on our way
On this Sunday

And as I look into your vacant eyes
I see no lies
Only one
Only one
Sad truth

Rowdy fights, Saturday nights
Feeling low on Sundays
Baby baby baby baby baby
You don’t hold me like you used to

Robert Garcia- Copyright 2015

Dylan’s Ghost- Songs of a Lifetime is available for digital download at I-Tunes, CD Baby, and Amazon Music. Purists who would like a hard copy of the CD can contact me directly at robert.garcia.56@gmail.com and we’ll make arrangements to ship it out to you.