Sodastream

Take Me With You When You Go
Trifekta, 2005

People become music journalists to tell stories like this. A few years ago I got to sit down with Karl Smith, one half of Sodastream, and talk with him at length about how he came to write one of my favourite songs. Sodastream was formed by Smith and double-bassist Pete Cohen in Perth in 1997. They relocated to Melbourne the following year and recorded ten or so records before breaking up in 2006. One of their last releases was called Take Me With You When You Go. On it was a gorgeous and gentle song with lyrics like something from Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, about a man in gaol writing a letter to his wife and recalling the events that led his to incarceration in detail so awful it still makes me wince. The story behind it was even bloodier.

The song, called 'Keith And Tina', was inspired by Smith's memories of growing up in a neighbourhood where tragedy was commonplace. The memories had come flooding back after he and Cohen were confronted by two drug users in a small town in Texas during a tour of North America. Sitting in an upstairs bar slowly making his way through a beer, Smith told me about looking into their eyes and having no idea what they were capable of or what they would do next. He remembered that he'd seen eyes like that before - in the woman who "slashed herself up" in the half-way house next door, and the man who called his mother for help one night after slitting his girlfriend's throat.

Smith kept talking, and the blood kept flowing. The final story he told me was of a murder at his high school. A boy had found and read his girlfriend's diary, and discovered that she had been having a romance with someone else. Soon after he went to school with a knife taped to his back and stabbed her during an English class in front of the other students. Smith hung on a particular memory – of consoling his shaken friend, who hadn't been able to retrieve his possessions from the school because they were covered in blood. I took another sip of beer and looked at the small, quiet and incredibly polite man sitting next to me and had no fucking idea what to say.