My This Is Life Verse (a capella)

A mini-post

I’ve been so floored with the love This Is Life has been getting from Dawes fans. It started out as just an excuse to make some music with people I love and now feels like it could be a regular cornerstone of the show for these upcoming tour dates.

When Matt from Winnetka Bowling League sent it to me it was just his first verse and chorus. I knew Nick was going to cook up something great but it wasn’t written yet. So all I had was that first minute of a song to jump off from.

When I first felt like I had a way into my verse (“Oh! I’ll start with singing about getting high and eating snacks at my sister’s condo!”) I wasn’t around an instrument. I was actually lying in bed getting ready to fall asleep. So I woke myself up a little and just kept listened to Matt’s demo over and over to get the melody right and then wrote it pretty quick. Once it felt right, I sent him a voice memo to see what he thought. What I sent him is the audio I’m sharing in today’s post. You’ll hear different lyrics in the back half. I still think they’re pretty good, but they got much better imho.

The lyric “Hate is just the love we’ve rejected” had been hanging out in my notebook for a while and I had actually been looking for a way to make that thought, if not the exact line, the main hook of a different song that I hadn’t quite figured out how to write yet at that point. When I found that the line fit well with what my This Is Life verse was becoming, I hesitated for a second before letting it go. But I’ve discovered that (and maybe this can be the songwriting advice/takeaway for today’s post…) never being precious and always letting the good ideas fit into the first spot they work in has always been a winning strategy for me. Whenever I’ve held on tight to something I thought might have been particularly good for some potentially bigger moment in a song down the road, the line often loses its power in my head and never gets used. There are soooooo many phrases that I thought would make great titles that just ended up as solid lines in a different song and I’m actually totally cool with that. Anything that carries the work forward - whether it’s a title, a stanza, a line, or just a word - is a win.

So here’s the 46 second voice memo I sent to Matt to see if what I was writing would gel with his vision for the song. He said he liked it.

Talk soon Talk Back!