Our song writing process tends to be that Gretta shows up with a skeleton of a song and some lyrics. The rest of the band starts fleshing out all the parts. This time, Gretta also had a rhythmic hook. It took us a minute to understand how it fit into the tempo, and you could feel the excitement grow. Once it snapped into time, I looked around and saw the huge smiles on everyone’s faces that matched my own. We jammed through it a couple times, and then we played through the entire song with Gretta’s scratch lyrics. The song basically wrote itself. We had the song done in a couple hours, pretty much the way it is today. In this band, we know a song has legs if we basically finish it same day. Really cool to see the excitement around it at shows, and then after finishing recording an EP we knew this had to be the first release. Huge thanks to Max Rose for mixing and Jack Endino for mastering this juggernaut.

The single is released January 3rd at our party at the Tractor. We go on early, so show up promptly for the show. See you there! This is gonna be an exciting year of music!

Like a river to the sea,

I will always be with you

And if you ever sail away,

I will follow you

These are not good lyrics. He rhymed “you” with “you”. And the metaphor is confusing, yet also cliche.  But seeing as I am no longer in the hating mood, let’s look at the good news: It did reach #1 in the US.

So maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about writing good lyrics.

In the meantime, Turn it On is a good song with a good message. And so is Land of Confusion. Good video, too. Really captures the height of the Cold War. Watch it to the end. Hopefully these two songs are how he’s remembered.