Three Chairs With Picture Frames
I'm twenty-six and I'm making a list,
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Three Chairs With Picture Frames
She is twenty-six and she is planning a wedding. Her father died when she was seventeen. Her uncle died when she was twenty-three, and her mother when she was twenty-five. Now she is making the guest list, and the three people she most wants on it are the three who cannot come.
She wrote about it in Too many empty seats with picture frames at my wedding, and the post is one wish after another. She wants to call her dad and tell him the date; she says she cannot remember what his voice sounds like. She wanted her uncle to officiate, the way he did at her sister's wedding. She wanted her mom to take too many pictures. What she gets instead is chairs with picture frames on them.
"Three Chairs With Picture Frames" is the ballad that came out of it. Piano and voice alone carry the first verse. Strings and light percussion arrive with the first chorus and step back again; the second pre-chorus is almost empty; the last chorus opens wide, and then the piano is left holding the room.
The chorus is the line she cannot get past:
I don't want picture frames, I want them.
One more thing in the post stays with the song. She and her father shared a birthday, a Christmas one, and he died on Halloween while her mother died at Easter. She says she does not want to mark the holidays with death.
Play it in the weeks when the list gets made: the seating chart, the invitations, the phone numbers nobody answers anymore. Or play it for someone planning a day the people they most wanted will only attend in a photograph.
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