My first demo on my phone of this song (the guitar only) was given the title ‘Up-beat Christmas song’. It changed, however, somewhat as I began recording it, and now I certainly see aspects of the Corona isolation in it.
The song began when I was toying around with the chords D and Dsus7, which every guitarist does sometimes. As always, I enjoy music with a drone-like element, and moving to C and then G, I retained the d-note throughout. Initially struggling with the lyrics when making the first recording, I ended with the line “Come have a drink with me – a drink or maybe two or three”, and the more I played it the more I liked it. So it stayed.
I had the idea of moving from the final G-major to Gmaj7 (which is a slightly odd chord which contains both a G and a F-sharp (F#), only a semi-tone apart, adding a sense of discord and tension). I liked the ‘odd’ sound of it but wasn’t entirely convinced I could make it work. When I did the first rough demo, however, I immediately liked it, and with the heavy drums and bass this part provides some counterweight to the light and playful verse. The lyrics came relatively quickly, and here too I wanted to balance the verse: the waking up, the confusion, some hangover (this part definitely echoing some of the isolation of the last month).
As always I struggled with the singing, but I actually am not too unhappy about it. My voice, while not great, has a certain fit with this song, I feel.
And finally, I think there is too little backwards played guitar in contemporary music, so I thought I’d play around with that…