the matthew show revisited: week eight
My friend and mentor, Little Jack Melody, once told me that you only get one chance to make your first album. No one knows what you're capable of yet, so if you take a chance and do something weird, you might be able to get away with it. I wrote the lyrics for this on the train home from a dotcom job I had in 1999, and the following year, with my freshly acquired home studio rig, started tinkering with some music for it. I think it took me two to three hours at the most to lay down 90% of it. I then took an additional half hour about a year later to go out to my van and play some percussion on the interior walls with my car keys just to see what would happen. I wasn't entirely sure the tune should go on an album that at the time was fairly ballad-heavy, but I liked it well enough to just throw caution to the wind, and it's a good thing I did.
To this day, it's my most downloaded song and the one I get the most traffic on. In 2005 it got half a million views as the soundtrack to a lonelygirl15 video after her coverage in Wired magazine, and it has been frequently licensed for podcasts and various projects over the years. Not bad for an odd little office rant and a few hours of messing around in a spare bedroom.