Song Sources: What Kind of Heart Beats

As Joe Scala put it, this is a song about international super spies: It’s a fun romp across Europe chasing a mysterious enemy agent codenamed The Marquis who murdered the narrator’s wife. Just as the narrator gets his enemy in his sites, he hesitates, realizing how hatred and revenge have consumed his life.

It’s probably the longest and most complicated lyric on The Habit of Fear, but I wrote it in one sitting during February Album Writing Month (FAWM) 2013, and while it is immensely more dramatic with the band behind it, the song is mostly intact as I first wrote it. Which just goes to show it doesn’t always have to be a struggle.

Lyrics

I was there in Rotterdam just as he pulled the trigger
Cassandra fell screaming to the ground
It was no place for a firefight, and in my hesitation
He disappeared at a run into the crowd

We’d lost Francis in Moscow but Guillermo traveled with me
It was the two of us now against The Marquis
He was deceptive and clever in his manners and his mind
And an undisputed master of disguise

But his face is etched in my mind
And there’s only so long you can hide

Chorus
No man can last forever
I’ll keep the promise from the night he killed my wife
No man can last forever and revenge will not consume my whole life

But he slipped the through the hands of the authorities in Holland
We lost track of his activities ’til August
When Gui deciphered the communique from Berlin
And I disappeared in a haze of rage and dust

But Gui called my cell that morning from the hotel
Thought he’d solved the disappearing act
We’d been together since the cold war and in the moment of his death
I heard the sickening catch of his breath

And his phone fell after a pause
No one else has given this much cause

Chorus

But I thought I caught a glimpse on a cloudy street in Prague
Moving fast against the Vltava’s shallows
Swimming through the crowd, like an eel through black water
But when I turned the corner he was gone

But the word on the street was he took the first train
Headed due west, overnight to Paris
And I lost four hours to sleep that I swear I couldn’t spare
But I saw him from the bridge across the Seine

What kind of heart beats
In the black breast of the beast?

He stepped from the cabs doors, lit a cigarette
Ran his carefully considered nails across his cheek
And he stopped and held his breath and he looked me in the eye
Exhaled a silver ghost into the breeze

What kind of heart beats
In the black breast of the beast?

And I felt the cool steel pressing close against my palms
The February cold froze my sweat

What kind of heart beats
In the black breast of the beast?

Chorus

One thing that happens with FAWM — or any period of writing a large amount of material in a short period of time — is the reuse of lines and themes. In this case “There’s only so long you can hide” came from a song I wrote just a few days before this one, called, well, “Only So Long You Can Hide.” For some reason I’ve left that song public on YouTube, which is the only place it can be found.

I don’t think I’ve listened to that song since I posted it. It’s back when my way of digitally recording things was to set up a camera and hope I got a good take before the 13 minutes worth of flash memory filled up. It’s not a good song, but probably not worth being too embarrassed about:

That song was also about a spy: “This is a story about a spy hiding out north of the arctic circle. He got there in the summer and got stuck in the winter …”

Apparently I liked some of the lines in this one enough to cannibalized them — there’s a couplet in there that got rewritten as part of “The Language of Flowers” as well.

There’s probably a few things worth glossing in “What Kind of Heart …” but a lot of it truly is what came to mind at the moment I was writing it. It’s not taken from a movie, though I can see every scene in my head. Why Rotterdam? Who knows! Why is the wife named Cassandra? Who knows, it sounds great! (Well, to be fair, Cassandra is the same root name as my wife’s name, so that might have had something to do with it, too.) Why is is friend named Guillermo? Because when will I have another change to use that name in a song? that’s why. Do they end up in Prague just so I can say “Vltava,” which is incredibly fun to say and delightfully obscure to American listeners? Well, no, in that case it might also be because I had read Eco’s The Prague Cemetery recently enough for the name of the river to stick with me.

Despite the setting’s trappings of cold war drama, this takes place more recently; you’ll notice the mention of a cell phone. It’s become a lot more obvious to me as the years have passed that many aspects and national traumas of the cold war still linger. The timeline in the song seems immediate, but another way to look at its background is that personal tragedies don’t go away when countries go from being enemies to being just adversaries. The alliances and nationalities of the characters in the song are deliberately unstated, because this is a purely personal tale of revenge for the narrator — there’s no evidence that The Marquis sees this as anything personal, maybe he’s not even aware he’s the personal target of a revenge story, though we don’t get his side of the story of course.

The part I’m most proud of in this song is the last verse, and the way it conveys hesitation. The established pattern has been to provide some narrative context before declaring in the prechorus that the narrator will take revenge, and, according to the chorus, it’s gotta be soon because he doesn’t want this consuming his whole life. The final prechorus — which contains the title, so ya know it’s important, right? — doesn’t follow this pattern. The Marquis is first standing on a train platform; presumably people are still exiting the cars. Back in the first verse, the narrator let The Marquis slip even in the heat of the moment because “this was no place for a firefight” — if he starts firing a gun in a crowded place and misses, innocent bystanders are hurt, and then he’s worse than The Marquis, because what The Marquis did was “just business.” So he hesitates. And the Marquis takes a cab, the narrator follows, and they at last meet face to face — and he hesitates. For the same reason? A momentary crisis of conscience about shooting someone in broad daylight at close range in cold blood?

The last chorus is the only answer to those questions, because the narrator says they’ll keep their promise. I didn’t think it was necessary to actually say that he fires the trigger once the gun is in his hand, but there is some room for ambiguity. I get a deciding vote on how the movie ends, though, since I wrote the script.

Music and Recording

The verse pattern is built around the Gm chord, played with a capo on the third fret. Only the index finger and pinky are involved:

|-2/3----3-----5p3p0------0--
|-5----5-----5---------5---5-
|-4--4-----4---------4-------
|----------------------------
|----------------------------
|-0--------------------------

This is the finger picking pattern when just playing the chords (which are just Gm – F – Eb – F -Eb – Gm):

  Gm                       Eb         F
|-3-------3----3--------3--3-----3----5------5--
|-------5------------5---------5-----------7----
|-4---4-----4--4--4--------5-5-----5--7--7------
|-----------------------------------------------
|-----------------------------------------------
|-----------------------------------------------

Pretty much all aspects of the music, like the lyrics, were present in the original demo, except that the demo was faster, and the guitar in second half of the verses wasn’t the chord stabs but rather full strums, which does take away some of the dynamics. I’m not going to bother posting it here — the video can be found if you’re curious for some reason, but some of the vocals are off key and I don’t think there’s much illumination to be provided.

This was another hybrid recording from the 2016 sessions and finished at home in 2020; we had recorded the drums, bass, and guitars at Chris Freeland’s studio, and I later overdubbed the vocals and redid some guitar tracking. One of the guitars we got to use was a beautiful 50’s Gibson archtop that Joe’s neighbor also loaned him way back when we did the Baltimericana EP.

In the studio, and in the original demo, I played the whole thing on the acoustic guitar. A funny thing happened though where I got very used to playing the song on the Don Quixotecaster after we recorded this, and in particular I got very used to the whammy bar dive bomb just before the final chorus. So I ended up doubling nearly all the guitar parts and using very little of what we recorded at Chris’s place.

Chris Hamilton and Joe Scala provided the backing vocals, which they did at their own houses for safety.

Some regrets? There are places where the chord stabs could have been cleaner and tighter, which might have been something we could have fixed with more studio time as it wasn’t something to fix in the mixing stage. I think I also could have done some more passes for the low vocal parts at the end of the prechorus — that low G isn’t much below my usual vocal range (it’s the first note in my vocal warmups, and I can go a half octave lower once I’m warmed up), but I think I was a little tight on them. I’m not exactly disappointed with the recording, but I will say with some more distance it’s smaller in its final form than it could have been. Maybe I will avenge myself on the next recording.