Oh, Tatiana

From the yet-to-be-released Instant Nostalgia

A song about yearning for a lover with the Eastern European feel (slowed down, this one would be a great tango, but they play it too fast to be a tango) similar to what we hear in “Paperweight Machine” and “Record Stack.” My initial distaste with this song was simply in the choice of the name of its subject: I thought that “Tatiana” was just too obvious of a choice for an exotic-sounding foreign name that’s four syllables long. As I listened to it more on live recordings, I started liking all the lyrics other than when it refers to the lover in question. It just seemed too easy to fit that generic name in there! Meanwhile, I discovered another one of my all-time favorite passages of Fluid Ounces lyrics in this song:
“Cause if one don’t get you
Then the other one will
In a major motion picture
or a rocking chair
You gotta land somewhere
It’s always sooner or later
Hither and yon
One minute you’re here
And the next you’re gone
You gotta be someone
You gotta love someone
You gotta know the end
Before it’s even begun
And be glad
Life is long
Yes, life is long
Say good-bye
But not for long”

Like “Vegetable Kingdom,” this song ambiguously addresses a very raw form of human longing, one that goes deeper than just a man loving a woman: more of a feeling that humans are somehow searching for a sense of becoming complete, most often attaching that feeling to loving another person. The delivery of these lines is the most frantic you’ll ever hear a Fluid Ounces song, begging for life itself to slow down to take stock of everything around.

The conclusion I reached is that in the end, Tatiana is like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea (another four-syllable, exotic name, though only slightly better than “Tatiana”), that she is more of an idea than a person, that she has a greater impact on the human psyche as an idea of inner peace than as just a woman, and that maybe, just maybe, she’ll only be found in death.

Courtesy of Steve Cross’s website, I’m posting an amazing acoustic performance of this song, with Seth Timbs on guitar and Brian G. Pitts on bass, from a radio appearance on WMTS on July 24, 2005.

Download Live mp3

You can hear the studio version over at the band’s MySpace page since we’re still waiting on the release of Instant Nostalgia.