Gotta

I’ve been playing this song live for years and people always seem to bob along to it and it makes me so happy to see that. It’s kind of a strangely formatted song, it has very little consistency in its chords and goes all over the place but somehow it really works. It’s like this because when I wrote it, it came out all at once in this 7 minute blurb of weirdness that I then chopped down into this cute little song. I remember vividly the experience when this came out of me. It was a moment when I all I could think about was the fact that I just wanted to stop everything, lose all responsibilities and just have some bloody time to do what I love… make music.

When I made the demo in my home studio, the funnest part was creating all the vocal harmonys. I had this ‘Mr. Sandman’ kind of harmony in mind and just went for it and created about 4 layers of backup harmonys! Then, when we did the song in John’s studio, he had to play every single morsel of every part back to me so we could recreate it with the same feel.

What I think is the most cool about how this song comes together is that the instruments really seem to be telling the story of this song. The Electric guitar is back there feeling all lazy and not wanting to do any work, the mandolin is cheerful and wants to go out and have fun, the bass is practising musical scales, and the piano is the song I wish I had time to play.