Somewhere Along The Way
Another early 2015 demo
We went on a long tour with Conor Oberst in 2014. We were opening the shows and we were also his back up band during his headlining set. I wrote this song during that run - a day off in Chicago at the Public Hotel. All in one sitting. I felt good about the way it was coming together and I remember showing it to Conor just about before anyone else. I’m sure playing guitar for his masterful tunes on a nightly basis was a major inspiration.
Listening back to this now for the first time in a decade, it’s wild to hear the edits I don’t remember making, but also to hear how it didn’t change much in the recording or in the live versions we’ve played since. A few words got swapped, I shifted perspective a little to make it all feel a bit clearer, and the intro and re-intro had a bit of a specific riff that we ended up abandoning in the recording session. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same song it started out as. That’s a nice feeling.
I do remember that recording it at Woodlawn with Dave was actually pretty tough though. The arrangement for most of the songs was pretty much established before we got there after having played them live a handful of times, or in a few cases we landed on something spontaneously that worked immediately (I’m thinking specifically of Now That It’s Too Late, Maria but we’ll get to that down the road), but how we were going to play Somewhere Along The Way was still a mystery when we hit record. I don’t quite remember it but I’m sure take 1 was a bit of a mess. Just shaking out the cobwebs and getting our head around the shape of the tune. And then take 2 is what you hear on the record, but we didn’t know that in the moment. We just felt like we were continuing to miss it, take after take, while the feel and arrangement were getting desperately stranger and stranger. After letting us bumble through this process for a while, Dave told us we were losing the thread and thought we needed to revisit take 2. I objected at first and we tried a few more things that lead nowhere and eventually I gave up. It turned out that Dave was right - there was a particular magic to take 2, even though we were still warming up to the tune. You can hear Tay miss a few chords here and there or Griffin’s snare sound change at one point because a cloth fell off the drum and then placed back on - all stuff that can happen in early takes at a session. But for some reason the song felt most alive in this performance and we committed to it.
For a record with very few overdubs, this song has a few. Dave added his famous Epiphone Olympic which is featured most prominently in the intro and re-intro. I had tracked the vocal live while strumming an acoustic (which is the only time that happened on this record) so I needed to go back for the electric guitar. We decided to have Dave play electric with me. This is the only song where that happened. I played my white tele and Dave picked up a Strat and we traded figures for the solo at the end, coming together for the guitarmony part that I had just written the day before.
So here’s the original demo, probably recorded within the hour of finishing writing it. I hope you enjoy.