How a Bedroom Interview Gets Captured Around Dating When You're Lonely, the NineFingers Acoustic Single
A Sacramento Songwriter Sets a Song About Leaving Between Old Recordings of an Eight-Year-Old Daughter
Before NineFingers reaches Dating When You’re Lonely, the album XLove stops in a child’s bedroom in Glendale, California. On an old recording, eight-year-old Indie interviews her dad, the Sacramento songwriter David Tetz, and asks who the romantic love of her dad’s life has been. The NineFingers acoustic single that follows answers with a question of its own, and the way the album is put together makes that answer land.
NineFingers’ Dating When You’re Lonely sits in the playlist below with other acoustic rock and unplugged picks from this desk, and the NineFingers artist profile lists every feature to date. The song reached us through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Hear it first, then read on for how the album around it was put together.
The NineFingers Acoustic Single Builds Its Hook From One Question Asked Three Times
The Hook
The chorus is a question that never gets an answer. Why is the person in the song “running back home”? The next line sharpens it, because this is someone who hates “sleeping alone”. In the closing chorus the question comes round three times in a row before that line returns. As a result, the repetition does the work a bigger arrangement might do elsewhere.
The verses carry no chorus-sized drama. Instead, each one sets an act of affection against a single act of leaving. In the first, she loves the listener in every way they have wanted to be loved, likes the sound of their voice and asks them to stay. Even so, every line ends in the same place: “you’re driving away”.
The Lyric
The second verse turns the contrast inward. She is “giving and kind”, she fills the listener’s mind, and all they want is to stay every night. Yet the verse ends with them “back on the road”. The song never explains why. Instead, it keeps the car moving, which is a braver choice than a tidy reason would be.
Heard after the interview with Indie, the lyric gains a second reading. In that recording, Tetz tells Indie that the romantic love of a lifetime has not happened yet, and that if it never does, she will be the one. The song that follows is about someone who cannot stay with a person who loves them. Side by side, the two tracks describe the same loneliness from opposite ends.
Dating When You’re Lonely Runs Three Minutes and 19 Seconds Between Two Interludes on XLove
The Structure
The single runs for three minutes and 19 seconds and follows the plainest possible shape: a verse, the chorus, a second verse, then the chorus stretched out to close. There is no bridge and no change of key. The lyric video shows how little it needs, with two verses and a refrain set down in under 20 lines.
The album around it is just as deliberate. XLove runs to nine tracks, and four of them are short interludes of found audio from the same family interview, from 14 seconds to two minutes and 10 seconds long. Dating When You’re Lonely sits between the first and the second. That second interlude closes the argument the single opens. Indie asks for the song her dad used to sing every night, and Tetz sings a made-up lullaby about coming home to her each evening, until she falls asleep partway through it.
The Room and the Credits
The credits are short. Music and lyrics belong to NineFingers, and Kyle Appleton handled production, mixing and additional instrumentation. Appleton engineered and recorded XLove at the NashWest Productions studio in Bakersfield. Tetz has worked this way before: Os Garotos de Liverpool reported in 2022 that an earlier single was recorded half in the songwriter’s bedroom and half at Appleton’s Bakersfield studio. The title has a backstory too. The XL in XLove stands for both size and age, because the album marked Tetz’s 40th birthday.
Who This NineFingers Acoustic Single Is For
Dating When You’re Lonely sits between two familiar traditions. On one side are the confessional acoustic songs of Damien Rice, whose 2002 debut O made quiet records out of unresolved relationships. On the other is the acoustic turn Everlast took on Whitey Ford Sings the Blues in 1998, when a hip-hop artist picked up a guitar to tell plain stories. Tetz works in both worlds, as a singer-songwriter and a hip-hop artist, and XLove closes with a second version of its opening song featuring T Davis.
Listeners who like their acoustic songs short, direct and honest about the gap between wanting to stay and actually staying will find a lot here. The single was released on 1 July 2022, and it has aged well.
AcousticMusic.News curator team: “The smartest decision on XLove is the running order. Placed between a child’s question about love and a lullaby about coming home, Dating When You’re Lonely stops being a song about leaving and becomes a song about where the singer belongs.”
Where to Hear the NineFingers Acoustic Single and Follow the Sacramento Songwriter Online
Stream Dating When You’re Lonely on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer, or buy it with the rest of XLove on Bandcamp. Every link sits together on Linktree.
Watch the lyric video on the YouTube channel, and follow NineFingers on Instagram, Facebook and X.
About The Author
