Musical Monday- “Girl with Golden Eyes” by Sixx:A.M.

This week’s featured song is a gorgeous one, albeit a cautionary tale. Girl With Golden Eyes is on Sixx:A.M.’s first album, 2007’s The Heroine Diaries. The album was actually a companion piece for Sixx’s book The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star.  In fact, throughout the album bits of the book are read out loud. If you know me then you know how I adore a concept album and this certainly qualifies as such. The record is outstanding, but very different from Nikki Sixx’s day job. He’s the bassist for Mötley Crüe. Don’t go looking for a Looks That Kill from Sixx:A.M.. They have a completely different vibe. This is one of those uncommon situations where I actually prefer the offshoot project over the root band. The group is named for its three members: Nikki Sixx, DJ Ashba, and James Michael. I only knew of Nikki Sixx when I first heard this song many years ago, however, the excellent song writing was a shared task. It popped up on my Spotify the other day and I thought it would be a good one to share with you. Girl With Golden Eyes is just one of my favorite songs from this album. Their song Life is Beautiful regularly ends up on one of my running or work-out mixes.

You might take a couple of minutes to listen to the song and read the lyrics below because it’s the words of the song that I would like to unpack with you today. The first part of the song is sung by Michaels and I really dig his voice. He has great pipes and his voice possesses a raw vulnerability and the ability to make the listener feel the emotion, the pain that the song portrays. The song opens with the line, “She speaks to me in Persian.” Persian was the type of heroin that Sixx used and it was gold in color. The song paints Sixx’s drug use as a love affair that later goes dark and abusive. He has been quoted as saying,  “Alcohol, acid, cocaine… they were just affairs. When I met heroin it was true love.” It’s clear from the opening stanza that Nikki Sixx had no idea what heroin would end up doing to him when he started. “And though I hardly know her I let her in my veins and trust her with my life.” The chorus is poignant as it expresses the depression and self-loathing that addiction has brought him.

By the second verse he knows she’s going to kill him, “I won’t have to wait long ’til she buries me with roses.” By his own estimates, Sixx overdosed at least six times and has recounted an out of body experience where he was above his body and watched the paramedics working on him. On another occasion he overdosed in the morning, went to the hospital, got released and then overdosed again that night. Crazy. To say it’s a miracle he is alive is the quintessential understatement. I should add, spoiler alert, that Nikki Sixx just celebrated twenty-four years of sobriety so good for him. Impressive that he came back. The spoken word section is Sixx reading from the Diary. It’s pretty straight forward and a tiny bit terrifying as he details his withdrawals.

Like I said above, this album has a lot of really good songs. I highly recommend listening to it straight through when you have some time to reflect, maybe on a drive or a hike. The story of addiction and recovery has a lot of highs and lows just as Sixx’s real life did, but ultimately there is redemption and recovery. In art and in life this is a comeback story and who doesn’t love a good comeback?

Girl with Golden Eyes