Just don't forget this is the same guy who wrote the song this very forum was named after, telling her "You're never gonna make it, baby".
It's interesting to me that the assumption is made that all of this Tusk stuff was about Stevie. I know several people feel that way, but I don't view Tusk as Lindsey's big anti-Stevie statement. I don't view it at all as his emotional low point. In fact, judging from the way he lights up and talks about how exciting the whole process was, I think Tusk was his emotional high point.
Lindsey was surely venting all kinds of feelings on Tusk, but I don't actually see a lot of it necessarily having to do directly or at all with Stevie. The only song on Tusk that Lindsey has ever confirmed might even be a little bit about Stevie is "That's Enough for Me." It certainly doesn't mean other songs didn't also touch on her, but I think Lindsey was making a different kind of statement than just commenting on his ex anymore. A lot of his music was very intentionally raw and I think just stylistically speaking, that begs for a lyric to match. His songs were a concerted effort to veer from the mature, slick, shininess of "adult rock" that many began to mean in a derogatory way when discussing FM. The tone is the exhuberant venting of frustrations over the box he felt the music industry wanted to put them in.
"The Ledge" in particular is one that is so off-the-wall that I think it could apply to any number of things. Lindsey's lyrical style is one where he seems to try to create an emotional atmosphere through the use of specific visual images and the tone of his voice. Those, along with the music, are indicators of how the song feels, without necessarily providing you with a coherent story about why it feels that way. Sometimes it's the form that tells the story as much as any specific words. That's especially true of his faster Tusk songs. Each is just a flash of emotion that has to make the impression very quickly and then it's gone just as quickly - because that's often how emotions flash through your head.
That one particular line - "you're never gonna make it baby" - is one that bears some resemblance to the notion the swim coach planted in his mind - "you're nothing; you'll always be nothing." It's a challenge that probably wasn't ever far from Lindsey's head as he dealt with his own insecurities while trying to forge new courses, knowing that what he was doing was going to shock some people. Certainly he has written songs to other people, but I feel that a lot of Lindsey's song aren't about explaining a point to other people. They're about the raw internal thoughts flying through his head. I actually think a lot of what people view as his invective directed at Stevie is the hard and critical light in which he viewed himself, and his total commitment to the creative direction and stylistic choices he made for Tusk.
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