| If Only I Could |
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Woke up smelling the sweet scent If only I could I would tell you I love you Lonely hourse they come and they go If only I could I would tell you I love you If only I could I would tell you I love you If only I could I would tell you I love you Woke up smelling the sweet scent
If Only I Could was an easy song to write, because it basically wrote itself. The melody of the chorus snuck up on me when walking my dog one cold November evening in 2001. Those are the best ideas, the ones that sneak up on you. I got home, poured a drink and sat down with the guitar to see if I was on to something here. Indeed I was, the song was finished two hours later. The demo was finished at around 5 pm. At that time in my life I wasn't quite happy with the way things were developing, especially relationship-wise. Although everything seemed so sweet on the outside, things were pretty sour on the inside of me. I just couldn't get myself to talk about it and eventually it all just poured out through this song. Musically, I drew a lot from Timothy B. Schmit and the songs he wrote for Poco and The Eagles. But I only realized that later on, listening to songs like "I can't tell you why", "From the inside" and my favorite "I can see everything". There's no deliberate copying or anything, but it's certainly derivative in a way that it's made up of all the stuff I'd absorbed until then in my musical life. There's a lot of major seventh chords in it, which I like a lot, but hadn't used in any previous songwriting. Funny thing is the verse and bridge seemed to be kind of long, because I had a lot of words to put in. But in the end it felt right, so I kept it. The next day Mark came over (we had already established a writing discipline by then) and I hoped very much that he'd like it, because he'd have to sing it and believe in it like I did. And he got it right away. We worked on the lyrics a bit, and he sang it beautifully and emotionally and that was it. That was the song, basically: written and recorded within 24 hours. So it sat on the shelf awhile until the opportunity arose to do a recording session with drum-legend Kenny Aronoff. February 2003: it was a dream come true, to watch and hear Kenny play on this song. He only needed two takes to nail it. But after the first take Mark and I looked at each other like "this ain't happening, right? This is amazing! Don't wake me if I'm dreaming!". So when Mr. Aronoff asked us what we thought of the first take, we were like ... ummm, yeah, U rock! This is it! But Kenny wanted to do another take, which ended up even better than the first (Mark suggested the "Blaze of Glory"- type break on the tom-toms in the last chorus). The song started to sound like the song I'd envisioned. The groove was there, but it needed some imaginative bass playing. Enter Mr. Jerry Scheff. One of the most adventurous and groovy bass-players of all time. In our book. And on our recording session. I can't recall the date, but it was somewhere near the end of the summer of 2003, we found ourselves at the Excess recording studio in Rotterdam, in the presence of Mr. Jerry Scheff and his Lakeland bass guitar. Now that's a daunting experience. Jerry came up with "the melody underneath". It's not just low notes, it's a whole new piece of music he's created, that perfectly complements the song. I love it. After that, the song - again - set on the shelf for awhile, while we made up our minds what to do with it (and wrote the rest of the album). I took out the original guitar fills and background vocals, figuring they got in the way of the "lonely" feel I wanted for the song. And I got rid of the drumloop Kenny played (sorry Kenny) and replaced it with rhythmic a loop I created from the sound of an old telephone dial. It added some more darkness. Then I replaced the demo rhythm guitar with the vibrato guitar and I re-recorded the solo, with a little more feel and grit. Mark did a beautiful job on the lead vocal, and Alex recorded some killer Rhodes parts. We'd been working on the arrangement for the strings for awhile, until we made the right decision to acquire the amazing talents of Mr. Erik Arvinder to arrange and record them for us in the summer of 2008. And that was it .... it's been a long time a-comin' ... but it's been worth wait. |
