-The Slopin Fairy 7 (2003)
“When You’re Not Meant for Love” was the second song that I ever composed. It was written in June or July of 2003, shortly after the first song that I wrote, “Break”. The title was very self-explanatory. I continuously failed to find a girl whose feelings were reciprocal. This was a time when I had many crushes on girls but little experience in relationships. I was likely still depressed because of Mary Holuba I started understanding my inner depression and embracing it. This was just who I was and it was mainly driven by the fact that not many girls wanted me.
The songs’ chords were taken mostly from a variation of Oasis’ song “Songbird”. I had learned to play it that summer and I’m pretty certain it came as an influence. The progression in my new song was very simple but the notes just rang honest and heartfelt whenever I played it.
When I recorded it for The Slopin Fairy 7’s “Slapin” EP, it was titled “When You’re Not Meant for Love”. Likely due to the embarrassment of the extremely transparent title, I shortened it to “When You’re Not” on The Slopin Fairy 7’s album “The Fairy” when it was recorded later in the year.
By the middle of 2004 I wasn’t playing the song anymore and moved on to my second ballad, “Ballad for a Goddess“.
-Vision Solitude (2007)
In 2007 the song came back in my rehearsal set list. For many years I accidentally mentioned that Vision Solitude was a very short lived project, ending the moment the demo was released on October 4th of 2006. This was mostly true, as the project took an immediate hiatus as I started to focus on Vision Lunar. But I constantly had ideas on the back burner for Vision Solitude. The first demo was intended to be an acoustic piece but due to lack of an acoustic guitar at the time, it was recorded with a clean electric guitar and turned out sounding more like the Vision Sufferance demo, recorded two days prior.
Back at my parents’ house in New Jersey in December of 2006, I had access to my acoustic guitar again. For the next three months I considered different ideas of what I could do to record new material acoustically and give Vision Solitude the proper material to break away from a Vision Sufferance knock-off.
On February 11th of 2007 I finally got the idea to bring back the old “When You’re Not Meant for Love” song. I must mention that I had just discovered reverb and a small selection of new effects on Cakewalk Sonar and was using this on all my new songs. That evening I recorded two takes of the ballad, reducing it’s name once again to the “Not Song”.
The first take featured some sort of bouncing notes intro which I could not figure out how I accomplished for my life. I kept it in the mix because it was so incredibly awesome that I accomplished that without even knowing how. Four years after its inception, the “Not Song” had slowed down considerably and took on an almost droney atmosphere. It also spanned nearly eight minutes. Halfway through the song, it sped up slightly, but returned to its slow speed to gradually end at a crawl.
The second take is more straight-forward. The quality is slightly better, less effects, a bit faster and only over five minutes long. But it does have a bit of a different build up at the end, featuring different strumming than any other versions.
I should have included one of these takes on the Triskalyon Promo Pack a month later, but I was plagued by negative influences at the time and felt too self-conscious about releasing new material on the compilation. This was a big mistake as it would have been much more successful with exclusive material. So Vision Solitude ended for good by the end of February of 2007.
Vision Solitude did make a brief return sometime in 2009 when I attempted to bring the project back as a post-rock band. I recorded a single song, “Solitude ’09”, but realized that it sounded exactly like a Vision Éternel song. So Vision Solitude died for the final time and the song was moved into the Vision Éternel folder.
-Throne of Mortality (2010)
The last appearance of “When You’re Not Meant for Love” came by pure accident in 2010. I decided to re-record the Throne of Mortality song “Le roi de la mort” using a 4-track tape recorder that Phil Altobelli had given me. By this time most of the cassette tapes that I had used to record in the 2003-2005 days had been lost and I only had left which I used occasionally to recorded new raw material. Unknowingly, I had a live demo take of the “Not Song” on one side of it and when I recorded the Throne of Mortality song, it dubbed over it. But when the new recorded faded out at the end, it revealed that some section of the “Not Song” was left and was playing backwards, which I thought sounded cool. I kept this as the outro to the song.