Walk Upon The Water - About The Songs, Frustrating, #1 - The Music, Part One

Walk Upon The Water - About The Songs

Frustrating

#1 - The Music, Part One

I sit around and play guitar, even for just a few minutes, almost every day.  Sometimes, it is in the living room, bedroom, kitchen, office, studio, even the bathroom while my wife is in the shower!  I know, TMI.

The thing is this, when you doodle around enough, an idea sticks.  That’s often how songs start for me. A bit of playing on my guitar, turning the same old chord or riff into something just a little bit different.

I’ve never said I’m a blues man.  In fact, I’ve settled into saying I am “Ameripolitan” because it is widely encompassing of several similar styles.  However, one of the things I do is play around with the tried and true, and the sometimes unfamiliar to me. And that is what I was doing when I started the music for what became Frustrating.

Playing a G7, with a particular rhythm, moving to the C7 and the D7 as normal, but adding a Eb7 to C7 drop just felt good.  And I knew exactly what to sing to it, because often I am humming a melody along as I am experimenting.

Of course, I also had this strange (for me) bass line going on in my head.  When I picked it out, it went against everything in my head that says something is “right” to do.  But, it worked and I kept at it. It actually came together pretty fast, but seemed like forever to me at the time.

Funniest thing happened, too.  When I was with the band, fleshing out the song to perform live for a showcase, we were looking for a way to end it because I had forgotten what I had originally done.  The bass player, Shawn Fernandez, suggests we end it a certain way and Matt totally agrees. We play it that way and are SO happy with our ending.

When I went to do the recording, I pull out the first rough draft, which i had long forgotten, and I had ended it THE SAME WAY! This is and always has been the ending to Frustrating.