New Song Demo! "Go Easy On Me"

Bleh. I started feeling funky (and not in an Earth, Wind & Fire kinda way) yesterday afternoon, and when I awoke today, there was little doubt that some kind of virus-type thing had taken up residence in my body. In other words, I'll say those two words that I try and deny to myself under any plausible circumstance: I'm sick.

Well, says Captain Obvious, being sick isn't fun. However, there's something you might be able to do while you're ill that you can actually do better than when healthy, and that's write a song. I'd had some experience with this myself, working on tunes of my own long ago, but then I had it validated by none other than Neil Young. He wrote a good portion of one of my favorite albums, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, from a sickbed. In an interview with author Jimmy McDonough for the biography Shakey, he gave the following explanation.

"Sometimes if I get sick, it's easier to write. Everything opens up. You don't have any resistance -- you just let things go. Your guard is down."

Interesting. Well, that works for me too. So back to today and feeling like crap and so on: I've had this song that I've been chewing on for a long time. I think I wrote the basic progression for the verse maybe six months ago, and for the life of me, every time I'd pull it out and start a lyrical theme, I'd just hate it. Also, the original chorus of the song was way sappy and it broke the feeling of the song into a mistaken direction. Today, I not only wrote a new chorus, but the lyrics seemed to just spill out. I could barely jot them down with a pen fast enough. I think the entire process took under ten minutes.

And then, so I didn't forget what I'd done, I powered up the camcorder and did a one-take video of myself performing the song for the first (and currently only) time. So, here it is.



VIDEO LINK