Creep: The Vivian Rogers Chronicle

Today’s Attire: Today I’m sporting my cold winter’s worse, a long sleeve lime green(chartreuse) crew neck tee (TJ Maxx $13) under a thick a midnight blue and white checked flannel (stolen from an ex because it looked much better on me than it did on him), black cotton leggings with zipper detail on the ankle (Banana Republic $17) paired with knee high black leather boots (Torrid $45).

Outfit Justification:  I woke up cold.  And I didn’t feel like wearing one of my blah oversized sweaters, and I clearly lacked much imagination.  I put this big flannel over this loud tee, to calm it down a little.  No, this isn’t one of my best outfits, but frankly I’m warm and that’s all that counts at the moment.  I usually spend half my day walking in and out of a server room.  I’m allowed to look like I’m kicking it with my 90’s grunge friends from Seattle.

Creep:  The Vivian Rogers Chronicle

This past Friday night, I was given the opportunity to perform again with Lounge-O-Rama at Britannia Pub in Santa Monica. I was asked to sing a song that I’ve been singing at karaoke for about 6 months, Creep by Radiohead.  I’ve never had the opportunity to sing it with a live band.  Scratch that, I did sing it once at a rehearsal with a project that I worked on.  But I have never performed it live with a band until this past Friday night. 

This has been one of my new favorite songs to sing because of the good reaction I get when I sing it. The funniest thing about it is that I’ve hated this song for about 5 years because of karaoke.   I’d heard so many people sing this song poorly and it was so overdone that I walked out of the bar every time someone sang it. It didn’t matter how good it might sound, I just hated hearing it.  My best friend David also had the same reaction to it.  Whenever we were in a car together and the original would come on the radio we each raced to change the channel.  A while back I was auditioning for a band and that was one of the songs that I had to prepare for the audition.  So I decided to give this song a practice at karaoke to see if I could stomach singing it.  And the weirdest thing was that I did my own take on it and it was good.  The audition fell through, I forgot about the song and left it alone after that. 

One afternoon when I was preparing to audition for The Voice, I was watching an episode of it.  It was one of the battle rounds. And Adam Levine of Maroon 5 had chosen this song for two people who felt it was completely out of their range.  I saw them do it, and then remembered I had done it once.   As I listened to these two people perform, I thought to myself “I can do better than that”.  A short time after the audition, I did just that.  Everyone flipped.  In my mind, I said, I’ll file that one away for when I need it.

As mentioned before, last year was a tough year for me. I was an emotional wreck for months because I was ill and didn’t know the cause. Then after all my health issues, I was really struggling with my voice.  A lot of damage had been done to my singing voice during the time I was sick.  I was struggling to do the one thing that I love so much and I was beginning to think that I might I have to abandon the singing thing because I just didn’t sound that good any more.   I had a performance that felt less than stellar about.  Plus a series of bad nights when I went to karaoke. Needless to say I felt lost.

Then I did the one thing I do when I hit some of the lowest points in my life. I look at the lyrics of song and really try to understand how they apply to me.  Doing this sometimes gives me a new purpose and perspective.  In the darkest years it was Sober and Who Knew by Pink. Around the anniversary of my father’s death, I started thinking about the lyrics to Creep and really wondered if they applied to me. Before I would just sing the song with no real thought to what I was singing.  But this particular day I thought about it.

The Song Breakdown as Applied to Me:

The main theme: “I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo” this is me, this is how I feel.  Here I am this girl, singing a dude’s song, in his range in the beginning.  That makes me kind of a weirdo.  Many people think I have I have a lot of attitude and think that I’m a bitch.   That makes me a creep.   

In the first verse “Couldn’t look you in the eye. You’re just like an angel.” refers to me being intimidated by really good singers and my lack of faith in my owning singing ability. In my mind I have a tendency to deify them.  “I wish I was special” This refers to my being envious of those people with those typical fantastic vocals.

In the second verse I take the song up an octave when it mentions “don’t care if it hurts”.  Singing in that upper range is completely out of my comfort zone.  A lot of the vocal damage was evident up there. Pushing through to my upper notes hurt sometimes, physically and emotionally. “I want to have control. I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul.” These are the most meaningful lyrics that hit home in this song for me.  It’s no secret that I struggle with my weight.   Wanting the perfect body is something that sometimes paralyzes me because I’m so far from it.  And I beat myself up mentally for lacking the control for letting my body get to the point where it is.  Although I want to achieve a place where I’m not punishing myself for being fat, and can accept me as I am, I’m not there yet.  If I ever got to a point where I accepted my body as is, that would be the equivalent of having a perfect soul.   It’s the mind body balance.

The bridge of the song “She’s running out the door”.  This has been my response to most awful things in my life, I’ve run.  A major character flaw of mine is the need to bolt when a situation has gotten tough.  I warned my husband when we first started dating, that I have had my share of trust and commitment issues and that plagues me.  If I can’t deal, I quit. That was my old philosophy.

In the final verse of the song “Whatever makes you happy. Whatever you want” there are so many of my emotional issues that are tied to trying to please other people.  And in trying to please so many people, I have failed.  But I mostly failed myself because it wasn’t whatever made ME happy.  And I was still struggling to be special and ultimately felt like “I don’t belong here”.

To sum this up, this song brings to light so many of my emotional issues.  Once I decided this was my go to song to sing, I put so much passion behind it became a therapy session every time I sang it.  This is my song.