This past spring, I found myself sitting in the courtyard garden of my building with my guitar one warm May evening. I was just strumming, not thinking about songwriting. There were birds and squirrels and new leaves on the trees. It was just nice to be there, playing. I started noodling with a simple three-chord sequence repeated over and over in a loop. It had a feel of strolling down a path or maybe sitting on a train, moving along at a steady pace. I started singing over these chords and a little melody began to emerge that followed the chord progression. It sounded pretty nice and I wondered if anything else was really needed at all. I was really enjoying this simple sequence. Just to see, I added a minor chord shift for a B section and it seemed to work. I began to like this song and a little refrain of lyrics came along, just a simple phrase: “You’re Not Alone”. I didn’t know why I’d be thinking about that, but as I began to build verses around that phrase, I realized the idea of being alone was on my mind these days and maybe this was about something. Not just about myself, but about how isolated we’ve become from each other. And also as a reminder that no matter where any of us are in life, we didn’t get there by ourselves and we’re still not by ourselves, even though we may sometimes think we are.
Once the song had some definitive structure, I went to my little home studio and began recording it. It came out ok, but I realized I was following ideas I’ve used before and I wanted something different. Ironically, I knew they I did not want to go it alone on this song. I’d worked with Adam Lindquist a number of times over the past few years. Adam is an amazing musician, songwriter and producer. He creates beautiful music, usually under the name River Lume. He’s been generous enough to mix a bunch of my home-recorded tracks and here and there has added unique musical touches, with some really sweet bass parts, violin, guitar riffs and cool production ideas. This time though, I really wanted it to be a true collaboration. Even though “You’re Not Alone” was more or less written, I thought it would be great to scrap my original home recording and start the arrangement and production process together from scratch. I thought it would be great to combine my songwriting style with the style of Adam’s River Lume music. Adam describes River Lume as his “mostly instrumental retro Latin/World music project…or something”. While it does incorporate Latin rhythms and instrumentation as well some other influences, it is not like anything else I’ve heard. River Lume songs are lush and mesmerizing, filled with hooks and fun, unexpected moments. Often they are built on the repetition of a musical phrase or idea that just keeps you moving along. If we could merge our styles, I thought we could make something really great. Lucky for me, Adam was game.
We set out one evening in Adam’s basement studio to see what would happen. Soon we were knee-deep in rethinking the song structure, messing around with lyric placement and grabbing anything and everything Adam had lying around that you could hit or tap to make a percussive noise (a trademark of the River Lume magic). Once we had a groove in place, and we got that three-chord thing going, it was off to the races. Shockingly, my first vocal take was a winner (this never happens) and we built off of these basic elements over that evening and one more session. Adam also added some beautiful string parts. What I love about his string arrangements is that they are not at all the tried and true approach. They are a little haunting while also comforting and always very original. At one point I wondered if, in all this lush sweetness, it would be too out of left field to have a distorted guitar solo. Why not, said Adam, let’s try it. Somehow, it worked. After some inspired mixing, we had ourselves a song. The artwork features a photo Adam took years ago in Italy. It was sitting in a frame in his studio. It caught my eye one night and seemed to match the song’s vibe.
I love the combination of simplicity, repetition and surprise in this song. I like its simple message and story. I hope you do too.