LINER NOTES, LYRICS AND CREDITS

Margarite was literally “the” first project for Natalie and me. Barely knew how to use Sonar at that point. Let’s write a song tonight, we said. Nat had this wonderful melody and a story about a young girl frightened by change. I grabbed the Taylor and said this is F# minor, right? Away we go. By the end of the evening, we had this real folky acoustic piece. Someday, we’d like to go back to that with a stripped down version: string quartet, piano, acoustic. But I couldn’t help but write a couple dozen guitar, string, key parts around this thing. Apologies all ‘round for over-writing.

The process of creating this song brought some great talent into our scene…

This was our first go-round with the indefatigable (?), Grammy-nominated Sean O’Rourke, who did the drums for us via World Wide Drum Tracks, over the interwebs, no less! Sean’s resume is off the hook (SugarLand, Mother’s Finest, Aquarium Rescue Unit…). I had had the pleasure of playing live with Sean, so I knew he was what players would refer to as a mofo.

Come time to get the song mastered, everyone goes “are you going to Rodney?” I googled Rodney Mills (Sheryl Crow, Journey, REM, Pearl Jam, 38 Special…) and called him. He answered his phone and promptly fit us in to his busy schedule. This gentleman has over 50 gold and platinum records for engineering, producing, and mastering to his credit. A bunch of number 1, 2 and 3 hits. And now, our stuff. This is the man that put the mike on the Fender Twin for Sweet Home Alabama, for *#@& sake! On the big day, I played hooky from work, drove over to his studio and sat at the foot of the master for a couple of hours. I left floating. Then went back to the salt mines to work on a bunch of spreadsheets.

Couple of notes on the tracks…

I wanted the last verse to be sonically as ominous / mysterious as Natalie’s melody. Coming out of the bridge, I had two tracks of Les Paul / Marshall feedback in harmony, all the way through. It was loud as a bizzotch, and stupid fun to record. Sean got his part right (big surprise). When Nat goes “leaves feather to the ground…” I tried to emulate that with the fingered harmonics, on a Strat / Boogie rig. Stuff like that…

Natalie came up with the counter-point harmony at the end on the first take, no lie. Mighty fine.

It’s funny, but a couple of friends separately came up with the same description for the genre this tune fits into: Chill Rock.