Intro

I have a friend named Barry who is the king of writing acoustic guitar intros. We used to live across the street from each other, he’d bring his acoustic over, and it seemed like almost daily he had another intro written. I don’t know if any of them ever got attached to songs, but they could have, and should have. Anyway I couldn’t help but think of Barry when I started writing this song. I just couldn’t think of adding words or making a song out of it. Even when I went as far as writing the bridge, it still seemed like an instrumental piece. I began thinking about which one of my songs this would be the intro to.

Recording the song because something else altogether. I’ve never really done any finger picking, and I’ve never been one for practicing. So when I sat down to record this piece with an acoustic guitar and a microphone, I found it just about impossible to get through the thing without mistakes. I know you can fix one or two of those in the studio, but I had to do better than I was doing. So I actually played the song a couple of times a day for a few days and tried again, and was able to use the 10th take or so.

One thing I noticed while I was working on this song was that it seemed to be crying out for strings. I did play a little viola for one semester in college, but I don’t have access to one now, and I’m sure if I tried playing one Ms Wippit would think I was torturing one of the cats. Then I remembered, Patrick’s got an Ebow! I’ve never used one of these things, but it can’t be too hard! I found I needed to use a little distortion to keep it going long enough for what I thought sounded good. I did about three takes, and then I heard something like an arrangement happening and went back and did a couple more with melodies in mind. The final product uses the last to takes with a little bit of a previous take in the bridge.