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For Everyone - The Evolution of a Song
I started writing the song For Everyone about ten years ago. Like most of the songs I write, it started with a chord progression followed by a vague idea of what the melody could be. One day I was driving and listening back to an acoustic strumming the chords, and the beginning of the chorus just came to me out of the blue:
When do we get to the part where we stop hurting each other?
How do we get to the place where we stop breaking each other down?
It had been some time since I wrote a song with a "message" and this one seemed to be writing itself. Suddenly, I felt this one needed to be done in a hurry and rushed out. I already had a couple of new songs close to the finish line, Yup and Paying for Lessons. Now I felt like I was close to getting an EP worth of material, and I wanted to get it to the masses.
It didn't take more than a couple of days to get the lyrics finished, now I had a song I could play on an acoustic, but I wasn't sure where it would go from here. I brought it to the studio where my stepsons worked on music and asked if they wouldn't mind learning it real quick and putting down bass and drums, I was still just strumming an acoustic. I think we wen't through the song all of three times and I brought home the acoustic, bass and drum tracks. In the big picture, I wanted this to have electric guitar instead, so I recorded a kind of funky electric riff over the drums and bass, put power chords over the chorus, and then another track of lead throughout the song. The final touch I figured it needed was female backups on the chorus. At the time I was in a cover band and I got the female vocalist from Tastes Like Chicken to sing a three part arrangement I put together, and I figured it was ready for prime time.
Since this was the song with the message I made it the title track of my EP, and I rushed it out to CD Baby and all the streaming services. You can check out that version here:
It didn't take me long before I thought this version was a bit unfinished, there's some latency in the lead vocals here and there, and I felt like I hadn't done the song justice. Being in a band, I did try to get the band to play it, but all they had to go off of was this recording. While I continued to play it at solo acoustic and songwriter sets, the song wasn't getting "out there" by any means. The more I played it, the more I heard it as more of a "hard rock" song, something along the lines of what I used to write with The Kenilworth Project.
One night I found myself alone with a few hours and some magic mushrooms and decided to just make it happen. I programmed the drums and added the guitars and bass you hear on this version that one night, and added vocals a few days later.
The lead guitars in the beginning are a bit much, but you know how it is when you have tracks you laid down on shrooms, you want to keep those so the track stays true to that magic moment. I threw this up on SoundCloud and just let it sit, not really pushing it at anyone, just there for posterity.
I read American Songwriter magazine and I noticed that there are ads in every issue from a couple of guys that will record your songs "in Nashville". At some point curiosity got the best of me and I decided to reach out to Aerugo Productions and find out what it would cost and of course, what it would sound like. I sent him the two versions above and told him I thought maybe there was a happy medium between the heavy version and the original recording. I was pleasantly surprised when he came back with something actually very close to the heavy version. It opens with a loop that repeats throughout the song. He asked me to send him the backing vocal tracks from the original version, and he sped them up to fit in with this new version.
I spent a little time playing my own lead guitar with it and I sent him individual guitar and vocal tracks. He sent back a mix with my guitar and vocals. In the end I decided it sounded best with my vocals but all the guitars done by his team and that's the version I released as a single to all streaming services.
I did put up the version with my lead guitar on, in which I proceed to shit wah-wah all over Nashville, you can check that one out here:
I'm so happy with what we ended up here I already sent them a demo of my latest song, stay tuned!
