“Feral (Resembling A Wild Animal)”

I LOVE dark chocolate! …my favorite “flavor” of dark chocolate or way of eating it is combined with orange peel or orange peel bits. If you haven’t had it, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. That’s my favorite …and because I once read in Men’s Health that it’s good for you to eat dark chocolate everyday I probably take what they meant to be healthy to the extreme …haha, like I do a lot of things. I also once read that if you eat enough dark chocolate it can make you feel like you’re in love  …so instead of using illegal substances to spur my creativity on I will sometimes get “sugar high”

I’d never heard of the word Feral until one day I was chatting with my friend Gabby from Perth, Australia and she jokingly described herself as “Feral”. I laughed and said, “What do you mean FERAL?”, “That’s not a REAL word right?”. She challenged me saying that it was a real word and that means “Resembling a wild animal”. Sure enough I looked it up in the dictionary and that’s exactly what it means. I started thinking that it’d be cool to write a song called “Feral”.

So how does my love of dark chocolate relate to the song “Feral”? New Years Eve 2007 I was on a cruise and for whatever reason didn’t really feel like partying. I was in a chill, eat dark chocolate, and watch a movie mood. An hour into the movie I’d eaten enough dark chocolate that I was having trouble watching the movie so I grabbed my guitar and that’s how Feral was written. I stayed up all night until the next morning writing the song and indulging.

At the time I’d been listing to a lot of 80s hair bands… Guns’n Roses, Twisted Sister, and especially Def Leppard! That really comes through lyrically and melodically in the song. I totally stole the “F F F Feral”  idea from the Def Leppard song “Foolin”, and I even sort of used one of their lines (Def Leppard has a song called “Stand Up Kick Love Into Motion) and paid tribute to GNR as well with these lyrics…

Jump up kick love into motion
I’m outta time
I’m a rock’n roll junkie on a sugar high
Singing “oh sweet child of mine”

I still haven’t worked the word FERAL into my everyday vocab. Wanna help me start a trend?

“Hey Julie”

I was 18, only a couple months out of high school, and I saw Julie backstage on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship we were both performing on. She was singing in the production cast, and she was half Asian, half Spanish, and from Australia. The first time I heard her speak in her Australian accent I was kind of in awe  I don’t think I’d even ever met an Australian girl before then…I didn’t expect this quirky beautiful Asian looking girl to sound Australian! It was like I was watching a dog barking, only when the dog barked it sounded like a cat instead. Haha, there’s probably a more elegant and complimentary way of putting that, but you get the point

I knew that I had to find a way of talking to Julie so I came up with this excuse. I had just written a song that I knew was really good. I went up to the door of Julie’s cabin, knocked, bumbling tried to introduced myself and explain to her that I had written a song, and because she was a professional singer I was hoping she would give me her “professional opinion”. She agreed. SCORE!!! …Now I was sitting in my cabin with Julie and I was playing her a beautiful love song I’d just written, that I already knew was good, but I just used the excuse of asking her opinion to get a chance to talk to her. …From the minute I saw Julie I just KNEW that we would hit it off …and we totally did. We ended up sitting in the cabin talking for about four hours after I’d played my song for her. I needed a reason to get back together and hang out with her alone again though ASAP …so I decided I’d write HER a song.

The rest of that day I worked on writing “Hey Julie” based on what I’d learned about Julie from our four hours of talking. I finished the first verse and chorus of the song. The next day I knocked on Julie’s door again and told her that I’d started writing a song that she’d inspired, but I thought we should hang out and talk some more because I needed a little more material for the song. Slick …I know haha. That day after we hung out I went back to my room and wrote the second verse.

One last time I used the same excuse the following day telling her that I was ALMOST done with the song …by this time Julie and I were really hitting it off though, and I didn’t even really need to use the song as the excuse. That third day as I was in the shower after we’d hung out on deck I was thinking about Julie’s favorite musicals …our love of musicals was something we both really had in common and we spent a lot of our time talking discussing our favorite shows …which characters we would like to play …etc. That’s how the “Bridge” the final part of the song came about. It’s the only part of the song that’s not very literal and much more metaphorical. I basically just took lines/parts of songs from our favorite musicals and strung them together.

“Memory in the moonlight” (“Memory” from CATS)

“The talent’s all moved out” (“Movin Out” …the Billy Joel Musical)

“Glory takes a shot and fades” (“One Song Glory” from RENT)

“As the lucky take a bow” …this line isn’t from a musical but just describes how no matter how talented someone is when it comes to getting cast in a musical there’s always a little bit of “luck” that comes into play in the casting process.

The next day I called Julie up to let her know I’d finished her song. She came over to my cabin and I played it for her. She loved it! …a few days later I asked Julie to be my girlfriend and we ended up dating for a good while. She was my first love. The rest of the song is just exactly what I was feeling and what I learned about Julie from our first few conversations. I love the innocence, hope, and excitement that I feel when I listen back to the song now, and I love being that same 18 year old boy with the crush of a lifetime every time I play “Hey Julie” on stage to this day.

“Last Train Out Of Sydney”

…”Last Train Out Sydney” …I kind of stole the title. …but not really. haha. There’s a really famous and AWESOME song called “Khe Sahn” by a great Australian band called Cold Chisel who’s lead singer Jimmy Barnes  ended up having an amazing solo career in Australia. ANYTIME the song “Khe Sahn” (about the Vietnam War) comes on in a bar in Australia EVERYONE sings along! Most people know the song though by the name “Last Train Out Of Sydney” because the chorus starts with the line “The last PLANE out of Sydney’s almost gone”. The thing is the way Jimmy Barnes sings the lyric it sounds more like Train than Plane. Haha. Confused yet? I learned all of this while traveling around Australia.

One night after hanging out in downtown Sydney I was ready to head back to where I was staying near “Korean Town” so I asked for directions to the train station. I was told that the train’s stopped running for the night at a certain time and since it was already really late I might not be able to make it on a train. I’d probably have to take the bus which would apparently take “Forever” to get me back home. I decided to chance making the train anyway and I ran as fast as I possibly could to “Town Hall Station”. The literal “last train” of the night from ANY station left for there. Very luckily I made it on with about 5min to spare! Woohoo! As I was sitting there waiting for the train to leave I had the song “Working Class Man” (Jimmy Barnes most popular solo song) stuck in my head from hearing it earlier in the day, and I started thinking how funny it was that I was on the LITERAL “Last Train Out Of Sydney”.

Most of the time I look at the world probably the same way that everyone does most of the time not really “noticing” the movements of people around me as being significant, but SOMETIMES something inside me makes me stop and makes wonder what else is happening OUTSIDE of me. Something that night made me stop. Maybe it was just the fact that I was going to be sitting on that train for a while with no ipod, no magazine, and nothing to do but watch. I asked a lady sitting next to me if I could borrow a pen and a piece of her newspaper and the entire train ride all I did was write down what I saw and I exactly what I thought about what I saw. By the time I made it home I had a newspaper page full of my lyrics about the trip with no real particular semblance of a song, but there was something that felt “real” about the observations. Maybe because it was scribbled on a piece of newspaper or maybe because it was just EXACTLY what I saw and what happened on that train ride.

Two weeks later I was sitting in a hotel room and the song “Everybody Hurts” by REM came up on a random playlist on my computer …as I was listening to it I thought about the lyrics that I’d written, pulled out the newspaper page from my suitcase, and sat down with my guitar. That was the feeling that I wanted for these words. I started strumming a few chords (not the REM chords, but in the same 3/3 time signature) and just singing the lyrics from the newspaper page over the chords. That’s what became “Last Train Out Of Sydney”. Fifteen minutes later the song was finished.

Sometimes the song will come on my ipod while I’m on a plane, bus, or train and I’ll take another ride through other people’s lives on the last train out of Sydney.

“Party All Night Long (Australia)”

I’ve always felt inspired by Australia. The first girl I fell REALLY hard for was an Asian/Spanish Australia girl …Julie. I think even more than that though I’ve always just really liked the Australian’s that I’ve met. Most Australians have a really laid back nature about them, and I LOVED the movie “Crocodile Dundee” when I was a kid. So when I got to spend 3 weeks in Australia in 2007 I felt really inspired to write about the the way the country made me feel.

On the plane ride to Australia a heard the flight attendant say, “it’s chock’a block in here today”, …I was like “chock’a block???” …”What’s that mean?”. She told me it meant “packed (full of people in this instance)”. I started collecting these phrases and a couple ended up in the song.

It’s chock’a block
Straight over the moon
On the beach all the girls are in full bloom
Until their rollerblades hit the pavement and their gone

I started writing “Party” while I was sitting on Bondi beach in Sydney. While I was getting ice cream on the beach I’d seen a candy bar called a “Flake Bar” for sale …which is basically a chocolate bar. ..So that’s where the next couple lines came in.

Grab a Flake
A shake
Forget the shade
I’m take’n in the sun
Till it goes down and we can party all night long

The next day I headed over to Manley beach where they have public volleyball nets and volleyballs for use. I saw this really cute group of girls hanging out so I told my friend James we should see if they’d accept our challenge in a game of volleyball …I figured since I was a foreigner it would be rude for them to refuse. Haha …and it would be a great chance to flirt with them   ..That’s where the next part of the song was inspired. James was a HORRIBLE volleyball player! We lost by a lot, but I still got one of the girl’s numbers

Yo crank it up
I’m diggin the groove
On a day like this you just can’t lose
Unless your friends all suck at volleyball (like mine)

I then flew to Perth in Western Australia to spend a week with my friend Gabby, and one late afternoon we were hanging with a couple “mates” of hers and I asked them if they knew any dirty Aussie slang they could pass on. One phrase that stuck in my head was “Epic Cans” …which he said basically meant “great boobs”. …I was dying to work that into the song …haha …so I did.

Epic cans
Tans
Block’n the sand
You won’t hear me complain
It all starts when
The sky looks like sorbet

I flew home with two song verses I loved, but no chorus.

My little brother Paul is a GREAT songwriter and we’ve helped each other out with a lot of songs, but never really written a song completely together. We were living together at the time, and late one night a few weeks after I got back I played him these verses that I’d written. Paul had this idea of making what I had of the song into sort of a Beachy/Australia version of “Hey Ya”. I started playing some chords and he just started singing “Party All Night Long …Australia”, “Put your hands in the air, Put your hands in the air”. I was like “man, that’s way too simple!”.  …but for some reason it just worked.

Then we needed a “Bridge”.

Paul and I both LOVE LOVE LOVE the Australian band “Savage Garden” …so we basically ripped them off. They have a song called “To The Moon And Back” which was a hit off their first album, and we thought, “Hey, why don’t we use a Savage Garden” line as a sort of tribute to them.” and that’s how the “Bridge” was born. The “talking” part of the bridge…

Now this is the part of the song
Where you put your arm around someone
You wouldn’t take home to your mother

was Paul’s version of “Shake it like a polariod picture” from “Hey Ya” …just a funny way to break down the song in a way that people would remember. When I recorded that part I tried to sound like “Captain Jack Sparrow”. Haha, see if you can tell what I mean

“Leaving San Francisco”

I was dating a girl in San Francisco a couple years ago and we broke up A LOT! Though it was on and off we were pretty consistently dating for two years, and we made for some of the best songs I’ve ever written. Everything was intense. Nothing makes for great songs like a real life break-up or finding that exciting new connection, and with us both of those things happened pretty constantly. To this day she’s one of the most unique and inspiring people I’ve ever met.

After one such break up I was flying home overlooking the rolling hills of beautiful San Francisco and my favorite Tony Bennett song of all-time “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” began streaming through my ipod. …as I was listening to the song I grabbed my laptop and just started writing. After another really painful break-up the lyrics that came out were pretty depressing. Haha.

The plane won’t wait so I just packed my bags
Six months down the drain the pain is such a drag
I try and drown out the pounding in my chest
With my headphones
As I’m leaving San Francisco

…and MY FAVORITE…

I’ve got a headache like a razor blade is lodged inside my brain
I’ve just begun contemplating going insane
There’s nothing like being thirty thousand feet up in the air all alone
Leaving San Francisco

I had finished all the lyrics up till the bridge by the time I’d landed, but there was no melody yet.

My dad and I are both big Elton John fans and I remembered a conversation we’d had once about one of Elton’s must upbeat songs titled “I Think I’m Going To Kill Myself”. The song has incredibly DEPRESSING lyrics, but a really happy melody. As I sat down working out the music and melody for “Leaving San Francisco” I decided to take my “razor blade lodged inside my brain” lyrics and put a carefree happy go lucky melody to them to as a sort of “songwriting experiment”. If it’s good enough for Elton John then it’s worth a try for me …well …maybe not everything. But musically speaking anyway.

Thinking the song was done I played it for a friend of mine and he goes. “…I like it, but I don’t think it’s finished”. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with him or not, but I was also still in love with the girl in San Francisco and I wanted our relationship to have a happy ending. The song deserved as much of a chance of a happy ending as we did. …so I finished it. …the way I wanted the story to end. And maybe the way that it should have ended. Either way every time I play the song I’m so glad that I did finish it and end it the way that I did. In the song San  Francisco is really more of a home or a person than a place. “You’re where I belong …back in San Francisco.”

“Not Alone”

I started writing “Not Alone” in a hotel room in Gdynia, Poland. I had been talking to this girl I’d met one day in Copenhagen and over the course of a few weeks started liking her a lot. We got along great. Haha, not too mention her Danish accent and the fact that she spoke five languages fluently! …I was smitten. (note, my first time ever using this word in a sentence).

…and then she gave me an ultimatum …I move to Copenhagen and stay with her …or I could continue living in the US, and in that case she was going to break up with me because the distance wasn’t something she was willing to deal with …looking back I guess logically it made sense, but at the time and kind of still I’ve always felt like distance shouldn’t be a reason to break up with someone without at least giving it a try. As much as I loved Copenhagen my juggling career was just starting to take off and moving to Copenhagen would’ve put a total damper on it. I felt very alone. It was the first time I’d ever kinda had the “cord cut”

At the time I really wanted to have a meaningful relationship with someone I was crazy about so badly, but I didn’t feel like I should really throw away my career. It was the first time for me that my career ever completely killed a potential love.

I always write REALLY specific lyrics and the first verse that I wrote for the song I actually felt was too specific and I ended up cutting it from the song (it’s the only time I’ve done that) …I didn’t know how many people could relate to a break up song about a Danish/Asian girl. Haha.

Here’s the original first verse that spawned the rest of the song…

In a souvenir shop in Copenhagen
I met the cutest little Danish Asian girl
I asked her for her number
She said “I like the fact you didn’t hold back
and let the fear of rejection keep you where you are.
I admire that here’s my number call me sometime.”
In a little while we were flying high
Did I forget to mention it ended badly
If anything great has ever gone wrong
Sing along

(If you see me live request the “extra verse” and I’ll be happy to play it for you …it’s actually a really good verse …the melody and flow of it’s really cool). I have a tendency to start writing songs that are really depressing and then start feeling depressed and give them a happy ending J …so I decided the song should be more about “hope”. I’ve always been pretty optimistic and I think that comes through in my songwriting. there’s usually a glimmer of hope in even most of my “depressing songs”. “Not Alone” is a break up song about the hope of love, and the hope and expectance of it’s reappearance

Love you’re so loud
And I can’t drown you out
Like broken kite string I watch you disappear into the clouds
But I’m not give’n up
No I’ll be look’n out
Cuz you’re good enough that I still can’t wait till the next time
You come back down

I feel like “Not Alone” has become sort of my anthem. Music connects us and that’s what I love more than anything about it. …I remember hearing “My Stupid Mouth” by John Mayer for the first time and being like “…man, I don’t feel quite so bad anymore …there’s someone else that feels and screws up exactly the way that I do.”

Keep on “saying hello” keep on “look’n out”…and if anything great has ever gone wrong “sing along”!

Hold You Tight (Westside)

I actually started writing “Westside” while on a scooter riding around the Greek Island of Santorini. The chorus popped into my head. “Take me away, take me tonight, we could be young the rest of our lives, when I’m with you, I’ll be alright, I will hold you tight, I will hold you tight on winter nights, and endless summer days”. My favorite song by Richard Marx is a song called “Endless Summer Nights” so I think I subconsciously/un-subconciously got the idea for the last night of the chorus for that. I thought that the time you want to hold someone tight is on a winter night. You know snuggling under the warm covers, or like on a summer day on the beach. I find those both good times to hold someone that you love close anyway On the trip on the way back to the USA I came up with the bridge. “It’s not about money honey, it’s about love, if it sounds funny to somebody, they don’t got enough.”. It’s a phrase that popped into my head on the plane (I write a lot on planes…haha.), and it reminded me of the kind of feel good, in your face kind of lyric that Bryan Adams writes.

The things is …I at that point I didn’t really know what the “story” of the song would be. What was the song about other than kind of escaping with someone you love. I played the chorus and bridge for my brother Paul when I got home and we started brainstorming ideas. There was this hot Latino girl at the Home Depot near my house (the house I was living in needed TONS of fixing up so I seemed to make trips to Home Depot about every other day) that I had a pretty big crush on. I never asked her for her number, but we would kind of flirtatiously talk to each other every time I checked out. I was telling my brother about her and I had written the opening line “Rock’n Roll chica, you’re the life of the party”, and suddenly my brother had the idea to make the whole song like a West Side story. The guy falls in love with girl from the “wrong side of town”, and they run away together. I already had the music so Paul and I stayed up the rest of the night writing the lyrics of the verses together and by about four in the morning we had it. I feel like “Westside” is sort of my “Livin On A Prayer”. The story of two people who have each other and because of that they are ready to take on the world.

“Lots Of Girls Like You In Malibu”

I started writing “Lots Of Girls Like You In Malibu” in the shower. Trying to dig into the subconscious of why certain phrases pop into my mind I know the word Malibu was in my head because I’d been listening to a few songs by Courtney Love’s old band “Hole”. The title of one of her songs is “Malibu” (Which was actually co-written by Billy Corgan the lead singer of “The Smashing Pumpkins” …isn’t that an awesome name for a band!). The phrase “Lots of girls like you in Malibu” just kind of popped in my mind while I was in the shower and as soon as I finished showering (ok, maybe I didn’t finish) I grabbed my guitar…turned on my Mac, and started writing the song. I wrote the whole song except for the bridge in like fifteen minutes. I didn’t know where Malibu was when I wrote the song …I thought it was probably an island in the Pacific. So the fact it seemed kind of almost fictional to me was the basis for the song.

Traveling around the world I’ve realized that most of us are sooo much cooler in other places. I just got back from England I must have had at least five girls randomly tell me the “Loved my American accent”. It applies to everyone girl or guy. If you’re not popular where you live it’s probably not because you’re not cool. It’s because you’re not cool where you live! If you go to Australia or China I guarantee you’ll be WAY cooler! You know that girl or guy with the English accent that everybody wants to be friends with, because they’re from England and have a cool accent. YOU COULD BE THAT PERSON!! Just Move!  It works the same way if you go to another English speaking country. A girl on a train last week in London told me she loved my accent and that she thought her accent sounded gay. Haha..

So the premis of “Malibu” is the same. It’s an anthem for those of us who don’t get the “hot girl” or “hot guy” where we live, and screw it, we’re tired of trying. We know we’re cool, …so we’re moving, or at least “Take’n a trip” haha. And everyone else who’s already cool where they live can revel in their elite status and become fat! Maybe go back and visit them with your hot Australian boyfriend/girlfriend someday and have them drool over his accent…etc.

The other song that influenced “Lots Of Girls Like You In Malibu” was the Weezer song “Beverly Hills”. My brother and I worked on the bridge together …which is probably my favorite part of the song, and wrote the bridge off of that feeling. “Around here all the ladies lounge, just a few feet off of solid ground, Can’t strike out, I can’t lose, Cuz the league I’m in has suddenly improved.” That’s what it’s about! Why try and step up your game socially when you can just switch leagues. Haha. So the moral of this blog is.

If you’re not happy in the “American League” join the “National/International League”!