Monthly Archive: June 2011

The other day I walked to Torchy’s Tacos for some lunch. On the way home, a song just suddenly came to me out of nowhere. I just started singing the first line and almost immediately had a pretty full idea of where the song was going. It’s like it was just suddenly channeling through me, pouring out of me. I knew that it had at least a dash of inspiration from a Sheryl Crow song, and Elvis Costello song, Muse’s version of “Feelin’ Good” and a Butch Walker song that had come on my iPhone “shuffle” 2 or 3 times in the last week called “Pretty Melody”. While it was nothing like the song rapidly birthing itself from my mind, I remember noting the quality of the vocals and that I really liked how they sounded raspy and kind of “tired” like he’d just woken up. I think another ingredient was that I’d been playing “L.A. Noire” on the Xbox 360, an atmospheric detective story set in the 1940’s. A few scenes took place in a jazzy club complete with a sultry German songstress.

Whatever the ingredients, I was being blessed with an aggressive muse that would not be ignored. About 2 hours later I had completed writing the music and lyrics. I immediately started recording. Keyboards first, then drums, then bass, and lastly guitar. Roughly 10 hours after the first notes and words had come to me from beyond, I had finished recording all the music. The next day, I took care of the vocals. A day or two of intense listening and fine tuning and it was complete. And I loved it. It was absolutely everything I wanted it to be. It said everything I needed it to say. Had exactly the atmosphere, feeling, passion and emotions that I wanted infused into it.

So throw on your best gown or suit, pull the brim of your hat down low, come on into the club and picture a sweaty little trio, traditional in some ways, ahead of their time in others, performing a song called Insomnia.

Just realized that in this age of Twitter and Facebook, I’ve been neglecting my own site and never even wrote about releasing “Waiting For Ms. Elusive”.

This song began at a gig with The Rock-A-Fellas at the Lakeside Icehouse. We were all ready to play “Hotel California” by The Eagles, but Donnie Wilson was having technical issues. So I just started improvising. Singing things like “Waiting for Mr. Wilson, to figure out what’s going wrong, waiting for Mr. Wilson, so we can all play our next song”, etc. Afterward, several people commented that they really liked it and I myself had thought it was a great basis for a real song.

On the 2 hour drive home that night I wrote the first verse in the car. I knew that I didn’t want to keep it about “Mr. Wilson” for several reasons, one being King’s X already has a song called “Mr. Wilson”. So I toyed with a few different variations, “Lucy Lusive”, “Lucy Elusive” but in the end decided “Ms. Elusive” fit the best. It wasn’t until some months later when inspiration found me again and I finished writing and recording it. I kept faithful to its origin by using my 12-string acoustic sound in my Variax, capoed on the 7th fret, just like Hotel California.

And so here is Waiting For Ms. Elusive