A LITTLE PUSH

A LITTLE PUSH

I wrote A Little Push in the spring of 2011 while in a sober living program in Orange County CA.

My friend/producer/artist/actor, Dickie Skinz, had send me this beat and had written/recorded a chorus into the beat.

I’ll have to ask him but I believe he wrote the chorus about me specifically and about using heroin/overdosing and what that must feel like.

It was an acoustic guitar over a drum track (which is one of my favorite styles of instrumentals to write over) with the chorus already in place the song came to me rather quick and I recall writing most of it in a van on the way to a meeting then recording the idea on my roomates laptop when we got back.

This was the first time I had been sent away to a 90 day program and the first time since I had picked up an opioid (at least 10 years that I had not only multiple days sober but multiple weeks.

Over the next 5 years I would write at a very fast pace and high level when in early recovery (Over the next five years I was perpetually in early recovery) my relapses would get worse and worse, the consequences would get worse and worse, but the yearning to get all of these feelings and experiences out on paper or to music would get greater and greater.

A little push is where I really begin to tell my story, to see my truth for what it is….”there is no one else to blame, I walk this lonely road again”…”my dreams of yesterday are gone”…”I walk through the land of souls that don’t care”…”Im apart from my Family and girls its unfair TO ME”…”If I do not fix myself I cannot help no one else”…”I need some strength, help me”… So I go from finally accepting that no one (Ex girlfriends, friends deaths, bad record deals, God) put me in this position except for me.

The self loathing comes in quickly though, that dream of becoming “a beloved song writer” is gone, no one believes in me anymore(mostly me), Now I spend my time walking through these places where people are strung out and look vacant of that divine spark we all are born with.

Im a part from my family, from my girlfriend at the time and her Daughters, who I loved very much but was in no shape to be any sort of parental figure to anyone (one of my biggest regrets, their mother is strung out on the streets of Boston, they were taken away from her shortly after I got home from this 90 day rehab and haven’t been back since…their Mother(my ex) grew up the same way (her mom died from aids bc of her iv drug use)…but still Im saying “Its unfair to me” which shows Im still seeing things from a very self centered point of view all the while admitting if I don’t fix this , I wont be able to be there for anyone.

The second verse Im talking to addiction (Opioids specifically) as if they were a person, a person I blindly followed because they made me feel better about myself and helped to mask any pain I was feeling(about anything) but they also masked my joy, excitement, empathy, sense of humor and all the other gifts that come along with being able to feel human emotion.

Im a sensitive person, I feel not only my pain but others pain very deeply.

I used to see it as a gift and a curse but 5 years later my counselor (Bill) at Alina Lodge would show me how much of a gift being able to have feelings and empathy like this are.

The Rap, at the end of this song starts off like a timeline, trying to recollect when I lost control.

Drinking and drugging started off as a way to not be nervous around girls or at parties or on stage or in the studio or before a hockey game…ect…when I discovered I could take something, that would take away the un-comfortability of the way I feel “now” I chased that into oblivion.

It was really a defense against caring about what others thought of me, which was a fear of not being enough.

The rhyme talks about progression and how I tried my first opioid after I broke my leg during football practice at prep school in 1996 (Coincidentally the year Oxycontin was introduced to the market) and how after getting to college and mixing prescription drugs with drinking my brain stopped being able to differentiate the truth from the false.

I talk about my first friend who died in a drunk driving accident of which he was a passenger.

It tells how we reflected about how it was growing up together in one second and the next he was dead bc the cops broke up our party and him and his girlfriend took off in their car and crashed into a tree 4 driveways from my house.

It talks about how I used alcohol to numb that pain and how I turned my back on God that day bc I was so angry and how my life had spiraled out of control (14 years later)…I really liked the rough draft of this song so I took it to Matty Trump (Just like I did Lost for Hope) who was now sober himself and running a music studio out in Hollywood.

We used Dickies guitar track, lyrics for the chorus and matty added drums, synths and recorded my vocals….Christmas eve of 2011, I showed my cousin (Dennis Hurley) who was an actor in Hollywood and was working on an indie film called “Once Again” and he thought, A Little Push, would be perfect for it and wanted to make a separate music video with his friend and director (Jed Hammels) vision…I believe I put the Little push video story in my timeline so no need to go through that.