“Our Creation” is the third song on Bachelors Anonymous’ unreleased third album, The Big Picture, remastered and released digitally. Bachelor David Hughes tells the story behind the song.
“Our Creation” began as a too-clever song I called “Or Jimmy Carter’s Bomb” in reference to the neutron bomb that was developed during Carter’s presidency. I saw it as the perfect capitalist weapon, maximizing radiation (to kill people) while minimizing damage (to preserve property and infrastructure). Ukraine was being invaded as we prepared this song for release and I couldn’t help but think how this could have been Vlady Putin’s bomb.
The remodeled song continues the theme of romantic ambivalence first voiced in “A Stranger’s Bed” while drawing on the Judeo-Christian origin story. This may be the only B.A. song in which the opening couplet of each verse contains no rhyme.
The Recording
As with “Father’s Day” we can date “Our Creation” to the summer of 1987, according to a 4-track reel of three keyboard lines. A later mix included drums and, thankfully, vocals. Rob edited this and, as with “What’s This Feeling?” we mastered it without any other modifications. All the tracks appear to have been recorded in our Pasadena home studio, The Men’s Dept.
Lyrics
In the dust of a man I went looking for knowledge
Through the gates of a garden littered with earthly delights
As the embers cooled and our love became clotted
Like the snake sheds its skin the strangers within us rotted
Chorus
We had no future, the future was now
You cry for no reason, I don’t know how
A signal on the screen and a shadow ’cross the sky
I want what you want, does that mean goodbye?
We’d both come from a place where we’d known good and evil
And from a second-rate hell we created our own paradise
If in the end it became just one more obligation
Well then what was the power we held over our creation?
Chorus
We created this thing just to say we had somethin’
And we put it together only to tear it apart
It was our greatest fear, that we’d get what we wanted
So we struck flint to stone and burned down the home that we’d haunted
Chorus x 2
Lyrics Reprinted by Permission
Credits
See album credits