As Pat said yesterday, these songs are from a jam session we had a little bit ago. We recorded them on his handheld recorder, and tried not to mess up too many times. Pat gave you some background on the tracks. I want to tell you a little more about the process of “Chicago (It’s a City)”. This song originated from our first trip to the Windy City as a band. The same trip that one of my favorite songs we’ve done, “Uncommon Ground”, was written. Pat wrote that song, and I was trying to write one too.
When I travel to a city, I always enjoy yelling out some song about the city. It’s obvious when you’re in New York (I never get tired of “Empire State of Mind”), and you can sing something for just about every city in California, but I was stumped in Chicago. I’m sure there are songs out there, but I couldn’t think of them, so I started yelling out “Chicago! It’s a city!” and it caught on. When I tried to write the rest of the song, I just couldn’t get anything going, plus it didn’t really go with anything else we were working on, so it sat on the backburner for years. One night I was sitting at my piano in Novi and started playing chords for it, and things started to work! Once I had the chords done, I went to Pat’s and we started jamming through it. Pat wrote most of the lyrics, and the song was complete! The main problem was we couldn’t play through it without laughing.
We had a lot of ideas for the studio recorded version, but we knew it was going to be hard to actually get studio recordings done, because we were so busy. We realized that the only way we could get these songs out to you guys was to just play them the way they were meant to be played. I hope you enjoy these tracks as much as we enjoyed recording them!
Eric