Well.... might as well do them all LOL!
Some songs take a few hours to write. This one took about forty-four years.
The first version of Three-Quarters Empty wasn’t a song at all. It was a poem I started in a notebook in 1982, when I was a student at the University of Alabama taking a creative writing class. I was eighteen years old, which makes some of the existential weariness in the poem a little amusing to me now. I apparently had already grown tired of life before I had done very much of it.
But the image stayed with me.
Quarter-filled cups of coffee.
I’ve always been a coffee drinker. Black. And I have also apparently always possessed the peculiar ability to pour a cup of coffee, drink most of it, become distracted by something else, and discover the remainder much later after it has gone completely cold.
Some habits survive every technological advance. My coffee cups have improved considerably since 1982. They are stainless steel now and engineered to preserve heat for what seems like several geological periods. I can still defeat them.
There is almost always some abandoned coffee sitting somewhere on my desk.
Over time, that became more than an observation. The cup started looking like something else.
There were the projects started but never finished. The proposals written and abandoned. Ideas scribbled into notebooks. Plans that seemed important for a season and then quietly disappeared. Dreams I pursued. Dreams I postponed. Dreams I simply outgrew. A life leaves quite a bit of debris behind it.
That is what the poem was trying to describe.
The Literature Behind It
The original poem carried three literary shadows with it: T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ecclesiastes.
Eliot supplied the most obvious one:
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
I loved Prufrock long before I was old enough to understand much of what Eliot was doing with him. There is something haunting about reducing a human life to tiny repeated measurements—coffee spoons, conversations, rooms, routines. A life can be enormously important and strangely mundane at exactly the same time.
Poe supplied another image:
“A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.”
And then there was Ecclesiastes:
“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
Those three voices somehow met in that coffee cup.
The poem kept returning to the tension between activity and accomplishment. We can be tremendously busy without knowing whether we are actually getting anywhere. Calendars fill. Papers pile up. Projects multiply. Years pass.
And somewhere in the middle of all that motion comes an uncomfortable question:
What exactly did all of this amount to?
That question sounded philosophical when I was eighteen.
It sounds different in my sixties.
From Quarter-Filled Cups to Cold Coffee
I kept rewriting the poem over the years. I have handwritten versions scattered through old notebooks, folders, Bible margins, and boxes. The version I eventually considered “finished” probably dates to around 1994, although finished is obviously a dangerous word to use with this particular piece.
When I began turning some of my older writing into songs, I naturally came back to it.
The first attempt became Cold Coffee.
It wasn't terrible. But I never really connected with it.
Part of the problem was musical. The genre didn't carry the emotional weight I heard in the original poem. More importantly, though, I had tried too hard to preserve the old language.
Words and phrases like epochs wasted, unrequited desire’s depth, and watched time belonged to the poem—or perhaps belonged to the young man trying very hard to write a serious poem—but they didn't sound natural coming out of a singer's mouth.
I had preserved too much of the artifact and lost some of the feeling.
So I went back to work on it.
Three-Quarters Empty
The breakthrough was realizing that the title had been sitting inside the poem all along.
Not Cold Coffee.
Three-Quarters Empty.
That changed the center of gravity.
The coffee is still there, but now it is the object through which the larger idea can be seen:
Quarter-filled cups of coffee,
Ring-stains bleeding through the grain.
Cold as all the half-formed thoughts
That gather in my brain.
That feels much closer to what I had been trying to say.
And I particularly like where the song goes from there:
Foam collapses into nothing—
Like the hours I try to save.
Little deaths of small ambitions
Settling in their grave.
The older poem was concerned with wasted potential. The newer song feels more concerned with time.
That may be the difference between writing it at eighteen and rewriting it at sixty-two.
At eighteen, unfinished dreams seem tragic because there is so much you intend to accomplish.
Forty-four years later, you understand something the younger writer couldn't possibly have understood: every life will contain unfinished things.
There will always be another project. Another idea. Another road you might have taken. Another version of yourself you never quite became.
And I'm not sure all of those things qualify as regrets.
Some are simply the cost of having lived one life instead of every possible life.
That is why one of my favorite images in the new version is:
I keep walking, though I’m sinking,
Ash and mud in both my hands.
There is resignation in that line, but there is also something else.
I keep walking.
That matters.
The song is dark. I don't want to pretend otherwise. There is Ecclesiastes in it, and Eliot, and probably more than a little Prufrock. There is the suspicion that much of what we chase eventually turns gray and that some of our grandest ambitions wind up as nothing more than old papers in a box.
But the person in the song hasn't stopped.
Maybe that is something I couldn't have written into it in 1982 because I hadn't lived long enough to know it yet.
The cup may be three-quarters empty.
But it isn't empty.
There is still something left.
And apparently I'm still working on the poem.
Which, considering what the poem is about, seems just about right.
Maybe I'm finally finished with it.
For now.
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