“Okay, I just thought you were dead, that's all.”
This was my boss, Nick, letting me know that he was sort of glad that I was still amongst the living. He'd been trying to reach me all morning as I drove down to Delaware for some gig I'd been assigned. Delaware is a lot like Purgatory. By the time you realize you're there, it's too late.
The night before, there was an incredibly intense storm, with tornadoes in the surrounding areas that really fucked shit up (not to get too technical on ya). The crazy part was that there was no cell service on my iphone because of the storm, which never happened before that I know of. So I couldn't let anyone know that my phone wasn't working. I wanna say this was around 2015 or so. Simpler times. Jesus Christ I'm just now realizing that this tune is 11 years old now. Fuckin' hell. Sorry for all of the expletives but time is a motherfucker.
Like so many other songs of mine, this is another co-write with my wife. She was plunking out some riff on her Fender Kingman bass, some slinky disco thing. I think this was December. Actually, it may have been Xmas eve.
Our collabs usually go like this: we'll work something up for a bit, then I'll usually try and bang out some words, see if there's a bridge or a coda or intro or something missing maybe, and then she'll usually move on to something else. I think this probably took like 2 weeks to write, with the words coming out all at once a little later as I worked a desk job where they mostly left me alone and some people knew me as “Zack” for some reason.
Two weeks to write meaning we would just hang out in our studio in our off-time (or our “on-time”) and try to find the nastiest or smoothest synth sounds, motifs and riffs while we searched for the melody and the song's true shape or whatever. This is usually some of the most fun you can have as a musician, really.
Having an instrumental track with a solid arrangement that you can just slather whatever you want all over is a gift. Throwing on some headphones and just going for it. Punching in. All of that. Then you can't avoid putting down your dummy vocal track. Unless you're lucky enough to already have the entire song written, more often than not you may find yourself with the words and music, but no melody. Sometimes you don't even have the words. You just kind of let your subconscious take over until you come up with something you can work with. Hell, sometimes you might get so lucky that you just blurt out the words and the melody in one take. That's happened a few times in my life. That's up there with just picking a guitar up and just having a fully formed original song fall out of you. I love when that happens. Happened twice last Summer (Okay Days and Sunlit Ann).
What did this have to do with my boss thinking I was dead and therefore not reporting to work? Good question. Do I have an answer? Oooh that's a good question too.
Basically, I was able to eventually get to the site my boss wanted me to report to (if I was still alive of course) and after a weird morning of driving back up from Delaware to Marlton NJ taking all sorts of odd backroads, I sat at my desk and the words just came out of me. So I guess technically I was paid to write Monotropa Uniflora.
I have to find the most realized recording we did of it, because it did sound slick and futuristic, with my wife and I singing falsetto in unison, because that seemed like the thing to do.
Anyway, we delivered the bomb. Oh wait, I mean here's an impromptu version I played on the radio (Wine Country Radio's The Drive 95.5 with Daedalus Howell). This might tide ya over: