One night, back when Brian and I first started writing songs
together, I was sitting on the couch with my foot up (I was recovering from
surgery on my foot) when Brian came into the room and said he wanted to write a
sad song. “How sad?” I asked. “Really sad,” he answered, “the saddest.” He went back into the studio and started
writing and arranging the music, leaving me on the couch (with a brain full of
post-surgery painkillers) to write the lyrics.
As you can tell from some of these lyrics, I am a big fan of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass
(the books, not the movies – although the movies are really good). In fact, the original working title for this
song was “The Incredible Sadness of Alice” but the Tim Burton movie (the one
with Johnny Depp *swoon*) came out just as we finished writing the song, so we
had to change the name a bit. But why
did we choose to change the name from Alice to Sonia? Well …
Sonia is another name for Sophia. Sophia is a goddess of wisdom. While the song deals overtly with depression
and suicide, the sub context is the death of wisdom (the ability to make
correct judgments and decisions based on experience) by the accumulation of too
much knowledge (information gained through researching a subject, with the
intention to use it for a purpose). In
today’s world, it often seems that people are so full of knowledge and facts
that they no longer realize or embrace the wisdom of personal experience. As T.S. Elliott asked, “Where is the wisdom
we have lost in knowledge?”
Incidentally, this is also a theme in the book Kasojeni Bay
that Brian wrote (you can order a copy here or here or here). In this book, he meets Sonia and learns about
the depth and reason behind her incredible sadness and, in the process,
rediscovers his own true wisdom. If you
ever wondered how our songs all tie together, this is the book for you.
The Incredible Sadness of Sonia
In a garden full of little heads
The cat no longer smiled
Mad as any hatter
She looked around and sighed
Children laughing at her
She turned her back and cried
She turned her head and lied
Then turned off her mind and died
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
She was a precious child
She was her daddy’s smile
All that remains is a dream
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
Now my poor heart it seems
Is all shredded and cold
For my dear Sonia
Like the Woolf before her
She loaded her pockets with stones
And not looking back
She waded in deeper
“It’s cold,” she gasped, “Oh, so cold.”
Wine-soaked and sleep deprived
She’d somehow lost her way
With silent screams of apathy
She hummed the song of day
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
She was a precious child
She was her daddy’s smile
All that remains is a dream
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
Now my poor heart it seems
Is all shredded and cold
For my dear Sonia
Sonia, cara mia, quanto ti amo
Non รจ giusto che ne sei andata
The ghostly embrace of winter’s first kiss
On Ferris wheels in the dark
She gestured with a hand that shook
With the sadness of her soul
The rabbit hole is empty now
The hatter’s no longer mad
The Cheshire cat no longer smiles
The Red Queen only laughs
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
She was a precious child
She was her daddy’s smile
All that remains is a dream
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
Now my poor heart it seems
Is all shredded and cold
