Tresselsound

This song was written this morning between 9:30-10:20. It’s closest to a “classic” Tressel song that I’ve written in a long while—the chord changes could’ve come from 1999. So it was extremely fortunate that the great D. Morey was in town to lay down his distinctive lead guitar lines on this track. Darrell and I have been playing together for almost seventeen years now, and while all of the songs I’ve recorded the past year and a half have been strictly solo productions—most of the songs from the fifteen years before that have sounded a lot like this one. That he was able to listen to the song once through and then produce a performance like this just shows what a great guitarist he is. I’m on the rhythm guitar and keyboards. Recorded today between 1:30-3:30 today,

There’s not really a whole lot about the writing of this song. I was straightening up my pile of reading material and noticed that all my Newsweeks and New Yorker magazines had tiny smudge fingerprints on all the pages. It made me worried that I might have excessively sweaty hands, but I think instead it’s just the quality of paper and ink inherent in mass-produced periodicals. That’s how the whole thing started. This would not be a song I would play on VH1’s Storytellers for just that reason.

I wrote it at about 10:00 and then finished the recording a little before noon.

I’m a bit of a title collector, and when I hear a cool phrase or think of a cool line, I’ll store it away as a possible song title. About seven years ago, when I was writing the songs for the “When You Were Ugly” project-that-never-happened, I was working as a substitute middle-school teacher; there was one kid who was the bane of my existence, and finally one day somehow we engaged in an honest-to-goodness, no holds barred staring contest. I beat that little snot in a staredown, and all of his friends saw him get beat. It was clearly not the highlight of my career as an educator.

I filed the name “Staring Contests” away and then forgot about it, until this morning, when a series of unrelated and frankly obtuse events reminded me of the title, and I started writing the song at 9:00 this morning, and recorded most of the basic track by 11:30, after several aborted attempts at creating a slide guitar solo. If you make it to the solo section you will notice that there is no slide guitar, and frankly, there’s a damn good reason for that.

When I was in my first band when I was 12, it was decided by someone in the band (I think it was keyboardist and saxophone player Brad McCormack) that we needed a ballad, preferably one with a girl’s name in the title. As the chief lyric writer, it fell to me to provide a song professing true love at an age where genuinely expressed emotions are ridiculed, and I spent a lot of time trying to find a girl’s name that wasn’t shared by any girl in our entire school. I settled on “Anne,” and while I did know an Anne from elementary school, the song wasn’t about her at all. This continued for a number of years, where I wrote songs about girls and then went well out of my way to obscure their identities (and often the true meaning of the song.) And I was thinking, well, what about one of those kids who wasn’t as sensible as I was? (I was thinking of that rather horrid song “Hey There Delilah”, and particularly the widespread story about its origins, whereby Delilah was a real person the singer knew, except that she was with some other guy or some such nonsense.) So, this is a song about a kid trying (or more accurately threatening) to write a song about Bethany. That he hardly knows her is entirely the point. I started writing this at 11:15 and finished recording at about 12:45.

This song is also notable for being my first recorded use of the word “choad.”

Randy Newman has all these great songs named after places; tiny little sketches of places that only ever seem to evoke the sadness of the cities he names—the things that were left behind, or the things that are keeping us from ever escaping. I woke up this morning wanting to write a song called “Galveston” because I had seen the city name someplace last night. And since I’d never been to Galveston (Texas is one of the few states in the continental U.S. that I’ve never been to) I thought I should write about a character who’d never been there either. What does he like about Galveston? Well, mainly it’s warm. I can’t imagine it’s any surprise to people up here in New England why that might be foremost of my mind right now.

The only problem? There is another song called Galveston by Jimmy Webb; I’d never heard it, but I imagine it is better than mine. So I did some research about cities in Texas, and Garden Ridge not only was the one that best fit with the melody (same number of syllables and meter) but it was actually a better choice of city for the song. There is NOTHING going on in Garden Ridge, TX that would make anyone want to move there, except that it’s warm and that it is sufficiently far away enough from whatever you wanted to get away from.

The music was borrowed from a piano piece I wrote for Jesse Thomas in the initial stages of our collaboration that eventually became the forthcoming “Plymouth County” record. I had hoped that he would write a vocal melody and lyrics for the piece, just to see what kind of song he would create over the chord changes. We eventually went in another direction, and this piece of music sat in my head for a while. I changed a lot of the chords in the verses and added some sections to accomodate the melody, and then recorded it this morning between 9:30-11:00am.