» Dreams and Bones

I got the hook idea in the shower. Immediately upon toweling off, I called Nick and asked him if he'd like to join me in writing the song. After he agreed, I said, "How about if we get together and try to write a song for which neither of us have any idea what it's about?"

Nick agreed, and we met at Bob's Donuts in Centerville. The people there were gracious enough to let us in the roped-off rear section, where we sat in a corner booth with my guitar, writing and singing. However, we did not come up with a workable melody at that time.

"Dreams and Bones" started as a "cold" lyric. I kept trying to imagine a melody, and Nick and I traded several possibilities by email. None of them worked. Then I approached Luke Davis - my daughter's boyfriend - about artists he knew about who were a bit different. He suggested Tom Waits, and I listened to several of Waits' more popular songs. His style didn't work for me, but the experience led me to thinking about Tom Petty. When I finally came up with the verse melody, I was trying to imitate Petty's style and could actually hear him singing it in my head.

Nick and I then met in his back yard one night to finish the melody. I think it was Nick who burst into the melody for the hook line, and the two of us worked out the melody for the chorus. I then went in a different direction on the chord progression and the bridge was born.

Nick has the recordings we made that night, and over the next year or so, I was apparently changing the melody without even knowing it. It became a private joke between us that every time I thought I had it right, he'd tell me I didn't.

Meanwhile, he was driving me CRAZY! I played the song inn 3/4, hitting the bass note and plucking the strings. Every time I started to play the song in his presence, he'd start singing "Sunrise, Sunset."

So one night I sat on my front porch and started picking the chords. The progression itself has a lot of character, and I liked the result of hammering the B string as I played it. Nick liked the new style, and so that is the way I recorded it to send it to Bryan Cumming for demoing.

We asked Bryan to act as our "George Martin" and arrange it with strings. To my pleasure and surprise, he reproduced my own picking style for the song as the foundation for the arrangement! I don't consider myself a great guitarist, but Bryan - a Grammy-winning professional and incredible guitarist - has on several occasions honored me by using my own guitar arrangements on my demos.

P.S. The attached image is Salvadore Dali's "Resurrection of the Flesh".