THE ROOMS



performed on:
Starting just after the September 11th attacks, the beautiful new song "The Rooms" became a nightly feature of the Science Tour setlists as the shows were becoming more stripped-down and well-recieved by fans. At the time, this was considered the best of Plaastik's new songs revealed on the tour. It was Nick's favorite song he had written in some time, and inevitably it became the subject of an altercation he had with Tina during the early stages of production on CHILD.

Fragments of the song date back to the sessions for SCIENCE; it was finished on the tour by the usual team of band jammers, all of Plaastik except Tina, with Nick responsible for most of the melody line and all of the lyrics. It was his "baby," and he later said that it -- along with Tina's "Look (Time)" -- nearly destroyed the band at the album sesions. For a time, the controversy was sidestepped. It had become obvious on the tour that Tina wanted to exploit her high-concept ideas for the song, exactly what Nick kept fighting; at the last show of the tour, it had become psychedelia. The rare attempts in the winer 2002 through spring 2003 sessions for CHILD verged on glam rock. Tina's only completed mix of the song was an electronica "haunted house" version she made during the early rehearsals, contained on her acetate for the album presented in June 2003. Forseeing this, Nick and the band never took the track on seriously in the CHILD sessions until Tina had left, leaving her post as the master of the record open.

On the album version, the lead vocals alternate between Nick, Janet, Jeff, and Jay. The song is SALT-like: paranoid, propulsive but soft and ambient, highly mysterious. Nick's production includes seductive backing vocals from Tina (actually a resampled portion of her guide vocal for the "haunted house" version). Despite the labor of love, many fans were underwhelmed by the album version, still finding it overproduced after all the stripping down Nick performed. Perhaps as a result, an extremely restrained electric version of the song premiered live in 2005 and was embraced, though this came only after a lackluster attempt at a rock version earlier in the short promo tour.


The purple room is where I met her
On a night when all the world was food
And she sat with me and reflected
We talked of the future, but mostly the past

The yellow room is where I saw it
Closed the window and locked the door
So no one else could find out
So no one else would know

The rooms are all I have
On the longest nights
The rooms are all I have

The green room is behind the heaviest door
It is where they used to sleep
In the years before the trouble came
Where I sometimes sit and remember

The rooms are all I have
On the longest nights
The rooms are all I have

And the halls can stretch
They stretch forever
But the heat is moving closer
The halls too narrow to dance

The red room is where I felt it
And the red room is where I stay
When there's nothing else in the world for me
I'll just go back there again

The rooms are all I have
On the longest nights
The rooms are all I have