Some songs are written in studios. Some are born on stages. And some begin with a teenage kid sitting on a couch in his girlfriend's basement, scribbling down lyrics while she wonders what the heck he's doing now.
Two Feet Away began that way sometime around 1981 or 1982, depending on whether you ask Ric or Darice. Darice apparently remembers the year better. Ric remembers the couch.
While Ric sat writing, Darice was either watching television or playing Nintendo, another detail lost somewhere in the last forty-plus years. At some point she looked over and asked what he was doing.
"I'm writing a song."
She rolled her eyes and went back to whatever she was doing. Ric went back to writing.
Neither of them could have known that the song taking shape on that basement couch would eventually become one of Ric's most popular songs. And they certainly couldn't have known where their own story would eventually lead.
Two Feet Away was roughly 90 percent written during those teenage years, with Ric returning to it over time and making changes as his life, writing and perspective changed.
At its heart, the song explores one of the strangest distances that can exist between two people, being physically close enough to touch while emotionally feeling miles apart.
Through male and female voices, Two Feet Away tells both sides of that silence. Two people still connected by love and memories, yet struggling to say the things that might bring them back together.
More than four decades after those first words were written in a basement, the song has survived along with the story behind it.
And there's one part teenage Ric definitely couldn't have written into the ending. The girl sitting a few feet away from him that day would eventually become his wife, and together they would have a son who probably has every reason to be grateful that she rolled her eyes and let Ric keep writing.
Two Feet Away, an early Ric Carollo song that grew up right along with the people who were there when it began.