For a pianist, I apparently don't write very many piano songs.

The first four tracks I recorded for this project were all driven by guitar or bass, and at some point I decided it was probably time to remind myself that I actually know how to play the damned piano.

Fortunately, I had just the song.

“Best Out of Me” was written sometime around 2006, during yet another collapse of my marriage. We'd managed to stay together for more than fifteen years, and despite everything that happened between us, I loved that woman dearly. But there was an uncomfortable truth about our relationship that took me far too long to recognize.

We were poison to each other.

Not because either of us was necessarily a bad person. We simply had an extraordinary ability to bring out the worst qualities in one another. The things that should have drawn us closer seemed to drive us apart. Affection gave way to resentment. Conversations became arguments. And the people we were when we were together increasingly bore little resemblance to the people we wanted to be.

I remember the moment that realization finally crystallized.

It wasn't particularly dramatic. There was no grand confrontation or earth-shattering revelation. Just the sudden recognition that a relationship can contain genuine love and still be profoundly unhealthy for both people involved.

Within about twenty minutes, I'd written the song.

For the record, I hold no grudges. I still think of her fondly, and I don't regard those fifteen-plus years as some terrible mistake. There were wonderful moments, difficult moments, and everything in between. But this song captures one particular moment in that history, and it isn't an especially flattering one.

That's the peculiar thing about writing songs from personal experience. You're not necessarily documenting an entire relationship. You're capturing how something felt at a particular point in time. And sometimes that snapshot is considerably less attractive than the complete picture.

Musically, “Best Out of Me” is one of the few compositions from that period for which I wrote the lyrics in their entirety, even though I had no practical way to perform or record the finished arrangement. The version on Track Zero is essentially what I originally imagined. And that includes the rather peculiar ending.

For years, I'd heard the song developing into an instrumental passage featuring woodwinds and brass, followed by a bluesy piano outro that seemed to have absolutely no intention of concluding. It reminded me of “The Song That Never Ends.”

It just kept going.

And going.

And going.

Every time I tried to imagine a conventional ending, it sounded wrong. A final chord felt too abrupt. A dramatic flourish seemed completely out of character. And simply stopping the music would have been about as graceful as driving a car into a brick wall. So I finally decided to stop trying to end it.

The woodwinds and brass lead into the blues piano, the arrangement takes its unexpected detour, and the whole thing gradually fades away. In retrospect, that seems rather appropriate. After all, the song is about a relationship that had long since stopped working, yet somehow kept going anyway.

Perhaps the music simply inherited the same problem.

The recording itself presented a few challenges, particularly when it came to balancing the strings and organ. Layering those instruments is tricky as hell. I've always thought of the combination as sunlight shining through fog. Get the balance right, and the result is gorgeous: warm, luminous, and full of depth. But too much sunlight becomes blinding, while too much fog swallows everything.

Strings and organ behave much the same way. Both can occupy enormous amounts of musical space, and when they compete rather than complement one another, the result quickly becomes a muddy, indistinct mess. Getting the balance right required considerable patience, careful attention to the arrangement, and more than a little experimentation. But when the two finally settled into place, they created exactly the atmosphere I'd been hearing in my head for nearly twenty years.

And then there's the guitar solo.

Sigh.

I'm a lousy lead guitarist.

There. I've said it.

I can generally coax something reasonably musical out of the instrument, but I'm under no illusions about my abilities. And of all the passages on this recording, the guitar solo is the one that still makes me wince a little. Maybe one of these days I'll let someone who actually knows what he's doing take a crack at it.

But for now, it stays. Imperfections and all. Because, ultimately, “Best Out of Me” isn't about achieving musical perfection. It's about capturing a moment of clarity that took me more than fifteen years to reach. It's about recognizing that loving someone and being good for one another aren't necessarily the same thing.

And it's about accepting that sometimes the best thing two people can do for each other is stop bringing out the worst in one another. Even when they wish things could have been different.