Andrew Stonehome

This was the first electric guitar based song that I wrote for this album. It was titled “Electric #1” for a long time among batches of musical ideas I had named “Electric”, “Acoustic” or “Piano” followed by a number.  

The idea started by playing the electric guitar along with the simple, rock drum beat. The melody for the verses came quickly and the lyrical line that came out right away was “Hey Judy, you need to retire”. As is often the case with the first lines that come when you’re singing gibberish while searching for a melody, I’m not sure where it came from or what it was referring to, but it worked musically.  

It’s important how the words work musically in terms of the sounds and timing of the syllables. This can make it a challenge to say what you want to say at times when the words don’t sound good musically in context. In this case, I found a formula that I liked the sound of musically, but had a hard time getting behind thematically. “Hey [insert female name with 2 syllables ending with hard “ee” sound here], you [insert 5 syllable phrase here]”.  

I wrote around 20 verse options to choose from and decided on the 6 that I ended up using. I was having a hard time finding how I could relate to this song based on the verses. I struggled with what words to use for the chorus and tried many versions but they all sounded too jerky and harsh. I finally landed on the ones I ended up using which seemed more relatable: this person has grown to resent different people he was in relationships with as much due to the stories he’s told himself in his head about them as it is to anything actually done by the people. 

One other interesting note is that the bridge part was an idea I’d come up with 20 years before, while living in a studio apartment in Eugene, Oregon and recording on my four track recorder.

As with all of the songs on my debut album, I wrote,  performed, recorded and mixed myself it in my 104 year-old house. Below are videos showing the recording; the first is a clip from recording early takes, the next is the vocals by themselves, and the last one is an early drum take.