Demonstration Tapes: All Arise!

A country stomper from '09, home demoed

Listenin’ in the barn. Photo by Autumn De Wilde

I wrote this song in/around the spring of 2009 — not sure where the inspiration came from. I think a lot of it had to do with this drive (that I’ve spoken of before) to write simpler songs. This one leapt out of a pretty standard country stomp G chord (capo’d at second fret, I believe). That wasn’t anything to write home about, but that neat little tip-toe up to the Cmaj7 (again, capo’d into second gear) suggested something…I dunno…more enigmatic. You keep on stealin’ / Till there’s nothing left to steal. The chorus, a bit of a throwaway, caps off with a line that is (yet another) humble offering to the time-honored tradition of onanistic songs.

We eventually recorded it during a soggy spring in 2010 in a barn in Happy Valley, Oregon. I remember being a bit studio-burned when we laid into it, but Annalisa Tornfelt’s fiddle added a kind of spark to the session and we made it through. It was tracked live — not sure how many takes we attempted, but it was a bunch.