the matthew show revisited: week thirty
Most songs come to my head in some sort of lyrical melodic form, prompting me to sit down and find the chords that fit them. This one went in reverse. I started banging out this chord progression one day, and ended up building a lyric and melody around it. The form is definitely influenced by the fact that I was listening to a lot of Grand Street Cryers and old R.E.M. at the time, so much so that I wondered if it might garner a lawsuit, but so far no.
The middle section is the creation of my old theater friend Micheal Preble. He wrote it as incidental music for a play we did back at Weatherford College in the early '90s, and I kept that tape around, thinking at some point it would be a good thing to use sometime in the future. And it was. I found cellist Thea Brown on Craigslist, and drafted Reggie Rueffer again for violin.
I'm extremely glad I asked Jason Jackson to try a bass part on this, because that riff absolutely makes the song, to me. It's bittersweet, of course, now that he's left us, but I'll take as much recorded evidence of his talent as I can get. And I am grateful to Jeffry Simms for indulging me in the crazy-ass drum ending that for some reason my brain insisted we had to have to drive home the motif. Sometimes dissonance is good.