Changes of Behavior

… drive me up the wall.

Changes of behavior drive me up the wall

One minute I fly, the next I fall One day I’m sad, the other I’m glad And the whole damn thing is making me mad One day I’m happy, the next I’m depressed And for the rest of the week I can’t get any rest One day pressured, one day relaxed One day confuses, another distracts

Am I young or am I too old

Am I achieving? Give me something to hold Wasting my time with soul and energy Am I playing right? Or is it a penalty? Working hard, then at ease Suffering now from emotional disease I’m bending over backwards in a rush to comprehend Help me help me mama I’m insane insane again!

Is this the beginning or is this the end

Is it me or is it my friends I need a hand to give me a nudge ’Cause without a push I ain’t gonna budge I need an arm around my shoulder To start me going before I get older Push me today, encourage tomorrow Give me a smile to take away the sorrow

You tell me I’m good, you tell me I’m great

First you will love me, then you will hate Things are going much too slow Or is it fast? I don’t know I don’t know!

Not the Blues Brothers.

This is one of my earliest collaborations with my musical partner-in-crime, Izzy Kieffer. Back in our yeshiva high school days, during that heady era when we had put our first band together and were expanding our repertoire of both covers and original tunes, he stayed with me one Shabbat in Rehovot, a city about 18 miles south of Tel Aviv. These lyrics started coming to us during the morning services at my local synagogue, and we had to keep repeating them (in an undertone, of course, so as not to disturb our fellow worshippers) so that we wouldn’t forget them. But it didn’t end with the conclusion of the services; being the Orthodox Sabbath observers that we were, we could not write or use recording devices until after sundown, so we kept rapping them out, over and over, reminding each other of parts we may have forgotten, over the next few hours till we could set them down in some permanent form at the conclusion of the holy day. Even afterward, on the hour-and-a-half bus ride back to our dorm in Jerusalem, we kept on rapping the lyrics and tweaking them a little as we went along. For all our efforts, though, we never introduced it to our band (Reality Shock) and never performed it.

Musically, the verses are in rap form, and although we were not well versed in the science of sampling, we imagined that the backing track would consist of some version of the coda to Toto’s “I’ll Supply the Love.” The choruses would be sung to a melody akin to that of the verses to J. Geils’ “No Doubt About It,” such pilferage being par for the course in rock’n’roll, especially for young musicians first setting out on the path and wearing their influences on their sleeves.

— Lyrics and commentary © The Hesh Inc. Originally published between 2016–2025.