Let’s get this out of the way right up front: Yes, this piece started as a piss-take on a Sarah McLachlan song, namely: “Building a Mystery”. , but during the writing process it became a lot more than that.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I was very much an early fan of Ms. McLachlan, thinking that her 1988 first album “Touch”, recorded when she was still young and hungry, was absolutely gorgeous, especially its centrepiece song “Vox”, and I still have it on original Nettwerk Records vinyl, and I cherish it.

However, a few years later, when Ms. McLachlan was deep into the “Lilith Fair” part of her career, I found myself a bit less fond of her. Now, lest anyone think that that was because of my having some kind of male-problem with the Lilith Fair concept, nope, that wasn’t the issue. My issue was about the music itself, specifically the way that a good chunk of it started to sound like treacly, weepy, over-produced, mascara-running-down-from-brooding-emo-eyes to my ears.

Again, to be fair to Ms. McLachlan, some of this was not, specifically her fault, but was more the way that others chose to use her music: (sad-eyed, rescued puppies-doomed-to-Eternal-Youth-in-Asia-in-less-than-three-days-if-you-don’t-pick-up-that-chequebook-right-NOW with Sarah’s lyrics: “In the arrrrrrrrms of the angels…” in the background, I am looking at YOU!)

Perhaps the tenth or fifteenth time I heard Building the Mystery, and actually paid attention to the lyrics, I started to realise just how almost absurdly twee it all was (again, my opinion, and not necessarily yours), and being that I was stuck at work that day, and more than a little grumpy, I remembered muttering to myself: “Building a Mystery? Pfffff! More like Draining the Mystery!”

The idea was duly jotted down onto one of my ever-loyal poetic fragment scratch-pads, when I wasn’t able to find an immediate use for it, and it has languished ever since, until I could figure out what to do with it. So, I figured I’d give the old grump a chance to angst about the way that some things are draining the mystery, rather than building it.

Now, with regards to the the direct inspiration, it’s quite simple, really. Between your teens and perhaps your Mid-Thirties, when you’re still learning how to, (at least you hope), successfully ‘adult’, and before you’ve learned enough of the hard, costly life lessons that you finally start to know better, how many of us make the mistake of extending just a little too much trust to someone we think is a ‘friend’, or perhaps a ‘valued colleague, who has our best interests at heart’, only to caught flat-footed one day, when we realise that not only were we disastrously mistaken, but we were taken for fools.

You know, there is a certain level to the pits of despair, where the nasty voice tells you that you can’t even be angry at such a person for ‘betraying’ you, because in the end, you believed what you wanted to believe (yes, Ghost of Tom Petty: I know I don’t have to live like a refugee. :P )
So yeah, as it was put quite bluntly to me one day in my ‘still know everything’ early twenties: “Betrayed you? The only ‘betrayal’ is the way you betrayed common sense and logic to believe for even a second that that wasn’t a completely stupid idea! But hey, you know what they say: Common sense ain’t all that common!”

To this day, I remember hearing the refrain from NIN’s “Head Like a Hole” in my head, or just the more general theme of getting served like a stack of iHop pancakes.