📖 Song Story: Earthquake Room

We actually met at music school, back in the mid-2010’s. Earthquake Dude was a friend of mine and played the bass. At the time, he was in my band...

✨ Welcome to Song Story! This newsletter gives insight into each song on my debut album, Typical Forever. Song Story tells the story behind the songs, the experiences, feelings and hidden details which helped me write this track.

🏛️ Earthquake Room

Well my doods, the first single of Typical Forever has been out for a few weeks now! Have you listened to it yet?

If you haven’t yet, go back and check out the Liner Notes, which is a look at the nitty-gritty details of actually writing the song.

But what’s a song without a story?

🎤 So… What’s The Story?

The one thing about writing songs that you need to know is that nothing is verbatim. If you want to learn about a person’s life and only have their songs to go by, then you’re going to get an exaggerated, over-dramatic version of the story. There will be telephone calls which were texts. There will be 2am fights which were disagreements over lunch. There will be mystical messages from the universe which were just ‘gut feelings,’ but nobody wants to hear about gut feelings. Everyone wants the universe!

This is one of the few songs… actually, the only song on the album which is about ~romance~, or lack thereof. It’s the only song on the album which is about a specific experience I’ve had with a specific person.

We met in the museum,

I never understood what drew me to you

Holding your hand in the earthquake room

We actually met at music school, back in the mid-2010’s. Earthquake Dude was a friend of mine and played the bass. At the time, he was in my band (a very ambitious seven-piece group! unsurprisingly we only played 2 gigs!) and although he was incorrigibly grumpy most of the time, it was an endearing personality trait of his. His gloom was counteracted by a blue bass guitar which glittered. Why did the grumpiest man own the most glittery guitar? He just liked it. And that was that.

Over the weeks I found myself drawn to him. I kinda liked him. He had this je ne sais quoi. And so, we sort-of-kind-of asked each other out and chose our first date: The Natural History Museum.

I’d only moved to London that year, and had been wanting to visit the museum since getting there. I had been there once before, on a trip with my family when I was a kid. One of the strongest memories I had of the museum was the earthquake simulator, which was a platform set up like a convenience store, the ground shuffling beneath your feet every few minutes.

A minute felt immortal

Skipping a beat to the clock on the wall

The painted packets of cereal falling endlessly

When we got to the museum we wandered around and I made it very clear that the mission was to go to what I dubbed ‘The Earthquake Room.’ I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Natural History Museum in London but the Earth Science block is hidden away and takes a bit of maneuvering to get to, lest you end up in the taxidermized bird section for eternity.

You’re into lepidopterology

Me and my date walked through the bug section first. Turns out, before studying music, he had done a degree in biology, with a special focus on butterflies. Again, another surprise interest for a man who had a perpetual cartoon raincloud over his head.

Eventually, we made it: the earthquake room! It was exactly as I remembered it, yellow walls, fake sundries on grocery store shelves which shuffled when the ‘earthquake’ began, and then righted themselves when it was over. You took a step up to the platform which was marked with a yellow border, and you were advised to hold on to the barriers around you. The shaking would begin, and a rumbling sound would play over the speakers above. After a few minutes, the platform would slow down, waiting another two minutes before starting the phenomenon all over again.

When we stepped on the platform, the shaking began. It wasn’t an up-and-down shake, more of a backwards-and-forwards shake, which felt jaunty and syncopated.

To be honest, it was pretty underwhelming. But the novelty was still there. For me, it was about reconnecting with a memory I’d had of this place, perhaps from sometime around 2001. When I was little and on holiday with my family. When everything felt large and like magic.

It was a moment in time

A perfect picture of ‘95

There were a few tv screens set up on the convenience store shelves, made to look like CCTV streams. They actually showed the real earthquake that this simulator was based on: the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.

This was a natural disaster which collapsed highways, made over 300,000 people homeless, and killed over 5,000 people.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but I did when I started writing this song: there’s something odd about a disaster like this being turned into a child-friendly museum attraction. But then I guess that’s how education works, isn’t it?

I remember when I was 12, doing an acting class in school where we all pretended to be in the blitz and running into air raid shelters so we could learn more about World War 2. Obviously, I had to make sure that I was the most beautiful and tragic air-raid child, my talents honed by years of amdram. I don’t know how much I retained about the blitz, apart from images of sandbags and Anderson shelters.

Disaster gets watered down and turned into something palatable so we can learn about it, but how much can we really learn through sanitized reenactment?

This juxtaposition ended up becoming the crux of the song.

At the end of the date we got dinner and I had my favourite dessert: tiramisu. I’d had a lovely day, he was a lovely person, but there was a nagging feeling that something was missing. I ignored it.

A week or so later, we met again to go to a friend’s gig. Before we hit the bar we got dinner by Kings Cross, where he put his hand on my knee and told me he was excited to introduce me to his parents, because I was his first actual girlfriend, and—

Wait. Ding ding ding ding! Awwoooooga! Awwwwooooga!

GIRLFRIEND?

At that point I had a smile plastered on my face but internally all the little people that run my brain were pressing all the buttons and running around with fire extinguishers.

I really wasn’t looking for anything at this point. And he was nice, but we wouldn’t be nice together, I just knew that.

I promised myself to get through tonight’s date, and then tell him.

Small little mercy: big fat ego

Can’t reset it, not when we go

Crashing around, knocking it over

Something fast and way too soon

I don’t know about other people’s experiences in their twenties, but telling someone you’d rather just be friends with them seems to have the other person thinking you’ve said something akin to “You disgust me and I would rather get run over repeatedly by a tractor than date you.”

I’m not saying it’s happened every time, but I’m just saying, in my life, it’s happened three times. And three times is a lot! A lot of times to get flat-out ignored by people in public. When you’re passing by them in the bar and say ‘hello.’ Or you are literally standing RIGHT NEXT TO THEM at a pelican crossing and they still won’t even acknowledge your existence. Because, what — you owed them something and you couldn’t give it to them?

Having been on the receiving end of this let-down many times myself, I get it. It’s embarrassing. You wish you could take everything back and then crawl into the nearest seashell on a tidal beach. I just wish that some men didn’t take it as a personal affront and some sort of indication of your moral depravity, or whatever.

This sadly was the case for me and Earthquake Dude. I let him down as gently and honestly as I could. I said I’d rather we stay friends because I wasn’t looking for a relationship. The cold shoulder I got after that conversation made me realise that I had dodged a bullet.

I didn’t want a relationship. I just wanted someone to go to the Natural History Museum with. I wanted to have a couple of dinners, a couple of kisses and have a taste of dating after not being in a relationship for about 5 years at this point. And that’s allowed. That’s allowed, right?

Maybe I just wanted a simulation. Without all the complication and mess of the real thing. Maybe I wanted to step on to the platform, hold on to the handrail and let the floor shake for a bit. And then step off.

🪩 Listen to ‘Earthquake Room’… Now!

How about you? Want to feel something over fast and way too soon? Like, 3 minutes of a pop song?

Go listen to ‘Earthquake Room’ now. Add it to your playlists or buy it for yourself.

✨ Bonus song: if you’re bopping away this song, you’ll like my first single, ‘When You Walk In,’ which shares a lot of the same energy as ‘Earthquake Room.’

🏔️ Up Next: Single 2…

Next week I return to regular posting for my weekly newsletter. Current topics include my foray into The Artists Way, new songs I’ve written, and thoughts swirling around my second album.

Single number 2 will be out before you know it! Maybe around the time that the leaves are turning golden, and falling from the trees… But until then, check out the album status below.

Typical Forever: Album Status

🔓 Single 1:🏛️ Earthquake Room [status: unlocked!]

🔐 Single 2: 🏔️ ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Single 3: 🌊 ▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Single 4: 🗺️ ▓▓▓▓ ▓▓ ▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Album: 🌋 Typical Forever [status: 12.5% unlocked]

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Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶