Where do songs come from?

You never can tell where a new song is going to come from. For me, they occasionally come when I mishear or misunderstand someone else’s song, which sends my brain down a whole new path completely unrelated to the song that created the original spark. Case in point: At the Luke Doucet show tonight I misheard Luke talking about one of his songs - he said it was about "falling asleep in the desert" and I thought he said "falling sick in the desert." Well, then my mind just took off with the idea of what it would be like to be incredibly sick and out in the desert in the middle of nowhere.

On the way home from the show I mentioned it to Bobbo and was rolling it around in my head when the phrase "High Desert Fever" popped up and it seemed like a pretty cool title and chorus. As we pulled into the driveway I remembered this amazing instrumental melody in 3/4 time that Bobbo’s been playing for a few years now. It has a real hypnotic, kind of psychedelic quality that really captured the feeling I was going for, so he pulled out the guitar and we started playing through it and moving some parts around to make it work with a lyrical structure.

Once we had the parts mapped out and the "high desert fever" chorus pretty solid, I walked around for a while humming the verse melody in my head, then disappeared into my office and started writing. I knew the story I wanted it to tell and the meter that I wanted to fit the syllables to, so it was just a matter of getting the right words to fit in the right places to make the whole thing flow. About half an hour later and a few more runs through on the guitar to make sure it all worked, voila! A brand new song!

So there you have it, a peek into our songwriting process and a preview of our newest song, High Desert Fever. Oh, and the Luke Doucet show was great too!