Lyrically speaking (or speaking of lyrics...)

Man I’m such a pain in the ass about lyrics. 

“There’s a fine line between Stupid and Clever.”

I believe that, even if it is from a fictional documentary about a then-fictional rock band.  Hence not finishing the lyrics to “I Love You Christina Hendricks” until just before recording them.

My bandmates must want to KILL me sometimes with my metaphorical feet-dragging sometimes.  I just want to make sure I’m not being hackneyed and clichéd, unless I am doing it on purpose.  Sometimes, you want to make the easy rhyme because it’s what the song calls for.  You’re using it to make a point, you know?  Other times, you’re trying to say something important and personal and you will not let it go until you either lock it up ot throw it away and start again.

Here’s a prime example. I met my wife in 1997.  The GK tune “The Story of You and Me” began to take shape, oh somewhere around 2003.  After I had written “Caroline” about the birth of my niece, my wife would continually harass me about why I didn’t write a song for her.  She was light hearted about it but it was taking a while.  That song went through about a dozen revisions before I brought it to Jay in the summer of 2005 and we hammered it out.  Nobody heard any of those old versions, and I kept not even one phrase from them, other then the title which came from the last draft.  I think she heard it for her birthday in 05.  It finally was released in 2006.

Conversely, I wrote “Jimmy’s Little Blue Hatchback” on the way to the Tick Tock Diner after a Comrades show.  I was watching Jimmy (their singer) Tetris all his gear into this impossible looking space in his car and remarked how amazed I was by it when bass player Greg said “You should write a song about it!” to which then-new guitarist Darren said something along the lines of “He can’t write a song about that!”

Greg looked at him like “yeah, that’s what you think!” and I proceeded to write it on the way to the diner, singing it for Darren as he got out of his car in the parking lot when we got there.  That was back when I could write my own music more reliably and not have ALL the songs come out like "Blitzkrieg Bop."  It’s not “Bohemian Rhapsody” or anything, but it’s a good song and didn’t require any further tooling.

I think the last two songs that have sprung full into my mind like that were “I Think She Used to Be a Man” and “Rebound Guy.”