When I first bought my Ibanez AS73 semi-hollowbody, one of the first things I came up with was the main chord progression for this song. I came up with a couple other parts to go along with it, but nothing ever seemed to “click”, and so a very rough demo just sat on my hard drive waiting for more inspiration to hit.
In August I decided to take a Monday off of work. I decided that I was going to record something. What, I did not yet know. So that Monday morning I scrolled through project files trying to find something that sounded fun. Then I came up to this song, simply titled “jam1”.
I really love the chord progression, and as I relearned to play it, I remembered how fun the progression was to play. But again, I felt stuck on the other parts. But I hammered away with my Gibson Les Paul in my hands, letting the guitar kind of guide me. By lunch, I had the bones of the song laid out. By the afternoon, I had a crappy solo down. By the end of the day, I had the rhythm guitars and bass completely finished.
Later that week I worked more on the solo guitars which, as someone who is not proficient at soloing, took a while just to get to this “passable” state. Are they great? No. But they’re not terrible either. Then I cleaned up the drums, adding some fills here and there, and wrote some piano and string parts.
Sometimes inspiration strikes, and sometimes it leaves you, which just means you have to work harder to force inspiration. That’s the part about being creative that they don’t necessarily tell you. It’s not all divine creation. A lot of the time it’s blindly fingering riffs on your guitar until something snaps into place. And even then, it doesn’t mean it works.
This is the first time in a long time where I’ve completely finished a song, artwork and all, and just let it sit. Normally, I’ll publish a song or promote a song within days of finishing. But I wanted to let this one breathe. Is it a perfect song? No. But weeks later, do I still feel like it represents me?
Yeah, I think it does.
The song was recorded over the course of a week at the beginning of August 2021 at the South Side Studio. I played my Gibson Les Paul and Sterling Stingray short scale bass, which was the first time I’d recorded with either instrument. I wrote all the drums and piano and strings myself. The artwork features a photograph by Elia Pellegrini from Unsplash.