So anymore when I write a song, I usually start with the hook... the refrain... the chorus, the part that everyone walks around singing in their heads. It has to be good. It has to be clever. It has to be original. The hook on this song started as a simple line of lyrics, "You'll never find the one that can be so true, when everyone you love is more broken than you". I spent about 24 hours riffing through simple chord progressions, trying to find that perfect smooth set of 3-4 chords in the right order to make this hook work.
So I settled on a chord progression in the Key of E. I played it over and over again until I had that syncopation with this line of lyrics just right. Then it hit me, and I asked my wife, "Does this sound like an Ed Sheeran song?". I don't even know the chords to "Thinking Out Loud", but it's definitely that same key. So I dropped this bad boy down to the key of D and doesn't sound like anything else. I got the hook just right, or so I thought, and then I accidentally hit a Bm chord on the 2nd part of that melody rather than a major D and it all fell together perfectly. I wrote the rest of the lyrics to the chorus and extended chorus in no time.
Then I did one of those miraculous sit downs and wrote the verses and the bridge in this song, chords and lyrics, in less than an hour. Sometimes the songs just come out of me, like I'm possessed or I'm not even control of what is happening. It's like someone is telling me the lyrics from the spiritual world and I'm just writing them down. I recently had a conversation with a girl friend who was having a rough time with the start of a relationship and it started to snowball the idea of this. A lot of people who aren't ready for relationships think a relationship with another person that is also not ready, will solve both their problems. And they'll both be "fixed". Some of us can't and won't ever be "fixed", because its just not truly possible. But harmony and balance can be found. I learned in my youngers days, that I basically dated to fail. I didn't want to commit in fear of getting hurt. I wanted it to blow up so I would get all inspired to write songs. I wanted to feel pain. I wanted to feel chaos. I wanted to feel something, anything. After all "Like Blood and Rain, Love and Pain are One in the Same" - Chris Cornell. But I needed order. I needed calm and tranquil. I needed sensible and logical and I found that in my trophy wife.
Luckily in my "elder" years, I've made these realizations about myself and I can simply reflect back to those chaotically emotional times in my life to draw real emotion into my songs, but keep a level head while doing so. This song just poured out of me like a river. Someone else wrote it, I was simply the passenger. I had originally thought this song to be titled "More Broken Than Me", but I can't have this blubbering idiot on stage pouring it out while people are trying to have a good time, so I chose to write it for others. LOL. I hope you enjoy this song. I hope to record it for real this year at some point.
You can watch a video of me playing this song on our FACEBOOK page
-Wes