"Trip Stagger & Stumble" is a love song, based on how clumsy one can get when you're out of your head in love. It's not often I'm of a mind to be a nice boy and write a nice love song, but this is one of them.

I didn't really have anybody in mind at the time I wrote it.

Looking at it nowadays, I'm interested to see that the character in the song likely has self-esteem issues. Anyone can stumble from time to time, but this guy seems to think it's a chronic condition based on being in love. There's reference to the "serious people" and the "graceful people" who scorn his pratfalls, implying that he doesn't belong to either group. Seems a tad rueful to me that he's "proud" to make them laugh at him, he's so in love.

The arrangement of the song is rather different than the original that was dropped from the album "That Which Does Not Smash" in 2000, which was a straight 4/4, beatlesque affair, similar to "Prove That Child." I think of this new arrangement as the Peter Gabriel Arrangement. I'm shocked to see I deliberately tried to play a riff then that was reminiscent of somebody else's style. Not because it's a rip off, but because I can't believe I thought I had the versatility at the time to do so. Which I did.

This is more evidence to me of the fact that that which plays music in me is NOT bound by the tiny man in my personality, who thinks he runs everything.