Real-Time Songwriting

There's nothing that irks the musician side of me more than an unfinished song. Unfortunately, I have plenty of these, and even more unfortunately, I don't imagine that I'll ever have a clean slate.

I used to record every last snippet of every little idea that I had ever come up with and that was possibly my worst idea ever. Granted, you don't want to accidentally not write the next Hey Jude, but as some wise soul once put it, if its truly a great song, how could you ever forget it? So ever since I stopped recording said snippets, I've been much more sane, but I still have a few dozen wordless melodies floating around in my head.

On Sunday, an epiphany hit me and I was able to finish writing a song that I've been working on for about six months now. I had been sitting on some chords and melodies for a verse/chorus thinger with a few random lyrics written. As I had when I was writing songs for the first Water School album, I was determined to write a really optimistic song. Thus, the few lyrics that I had written seemed to revolve around this single dude who's trying to get his things in order since his lady situation has just taken a turn for the better. And I had decided that it wouldn't be too long of a song. Maybe three choruses and two verses. Simple stuff. Except it wasn't...until yesterday, when I was bored and put my mind to it, and wrote those choruses and verses, in addition to a bridge that sounds like I stole it (and probably did) right from the opening track of Break Up With Water School.

The recording style is very reminiscent of what my friend Bryan does with his Tambourine Club recordings. A lot of reverb and delay. And tambourine.

One of the last lyrics I wrote for the song was inspired by how Gittings did his laundry last week and couldn't remember if he used any detergent. Getting into the habit of washing his clothes with just water seemed like something this down-on-his-luck guy would do, so I wrote a line or two about it.

I also doubled the lead vocal just like I used to do in high school.

Also, "bugging us out" seems like something that people say, but Google says differently.

I've always loved songs that utilize "Baby" in the third person. These come to mind:

Baby's Coming Back by Jellyfish,
Baby Gets High by the Blake Babies
Baby's In A Bad Mood by Michael Shelley
Baby's Coming Back To Me by Jarvis Cocker
Baby's In Black by the Beatles

Now, never in the real world would I ever refer to a significant other as Baby to someone other than her, if even her... as in, "Hey Rick, have you seen Baby around?" And I'm also pretty sure that the above artists, or anyone for that matter, would never participate in such a practice either. But that's what songwriting is all about. You get away with stuff that would make you feel like a real tool if you said it in a non-fictional setting. And this is my favorite songwriting liberty of all time.

So, yeah, maybe that all will make sense after you hear the song. Its not the best song, but its not long either...

I present to you the first recorded incarnation of Baby's Coming Home.