Paper Cup (tortured earnest folk) (4:25)

“Paper Cup” is part three of a tetralogy about quixotic idealization that also includes “Crawling After You” (part 1), “Pedestal” (part 2), and “Parallel World” (part 4). “Paper Cup” is mostly from the narrator’s perspective, though the verse that begins “You look at me behind glass…” is from the perspective of the ‘object’ of affection, a pointed response to the constraints of the narrator’s quixotic idealizations.

This is the ‘written’ version of the song. Also on FITS AND STARTS is an earlier version of the song, captured as a demo during his young adulthood in his basement bedroom right at the moment that the song was being written: Paper Cup (demo version, extemporaneous folk). Cryderman simply hit record on a little tape recorder and started to improvise lyrics. At one moment, his Dad stands in the doorway to ask him some questions, and instead of stopping, Cryderman just does an improvised guitar solo section as he chats. Cryderman then later re-wrote the lyrics of the song and slightly re-tooled the music for the version heard here, which was recorded live in one take and then overdubbed for the guitar solo, also one take.