Genesis
Independent

Whew, where do I begin? This is going to be long...

This song is the ultimate frankenstein, and a moral to NEVER throw anything away.

The two separates are primarily the verse and the chorus, so here goes:
Verse--started out on acoustic (but written for electric), it
immediately found its way to a synth tone. I believe I was
just dicking around with sounds when I happened upon the
synth tone and just started playing the riff. It was close but I
needed more. So I added a little portamento and boom: there it was.

The one thing this verse thing also had was the general melody and the 1st verse. I was able to spit that out pretty quickly. Then.......

Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing... at all. It sat around waiting to be finished. I wondered mightily whether it was even worth working on. It just didn't have any beat that I could settle on (although I did want it to be groovy). And I tried a ton of chorus ideas that just simply didn't work.

Then it dawned on me (blast from the recent past):
A couple of years ago this manager asked me if I wanted to tryout for what was to be Velvet Revolver's band because Duff had heard my voice on a CD the manager was playing in his office one day and (his words) flipped out. After some hemming and hawing (mostly because I was in my old band and also because I wondered whether they'd even care about my style), I said, You know what? I'll do it if for no other reasons than to call my friends from back in Orlando and simply say "You're never going to guess who I just jammed with!"

So, I get this CD with 3 songs on it; no lyrics, no melodies, just music. Here it is Monday morning and I was told "write lyrics, melodies for audition on Thursday." Ha...I love a challenge.

Very quickly I wrote stuff I actually liked a lot. During the audition though it was apparent we were all from different styles of music, but I left really feeling good about the fact that I wrote so quickly under such hilarious pressure. And since the melodies and lyrics were mine, perhaps they could one day be retrofitted to work in a new song.

Fast forward to a few months ago: The key was different, the rhythms were different, but I just thought these chorus lyrics could work if I re-fashioned it. (The good news is I only used the chorus; going to use the lyrics for something else!)

So, I did. And after a while, the song came to shape. The 2nd verse started writing itself, and more importantly the drums came to me. Lyrically, I just felt the song should be about how no matter how hard we try to be different we end up all being the same. Anyone get a tattoo recently? A piercing? Then you know what I mean. Rebellion is now in fashion and the norm. That strikes me as infinitely hilarious. Check out the geekout section for two tidbits related to this.

So strike your rebel yell and listen to this song. That is, if you don't got something to rebel against... ;)