Welcome to Episode 5 of the story behind the song!
This week I'm looking at 'Mostly What We Ain't' which was released as a single about a year and a half ago. I wrote this song as a part of my songwriting group (shout out group!) several years ago. The prompt that day was 'selfless loving saints.'
Yeah. I saw that and thought ‘nope.’ We aint' that. And the song was off from there. It's fun to lean into a very misanthropic point of view sometime, though I'm mostly a pretty positive guy. But sometimes people suck, so there's plenty of material for a song like this.
It ended up as a grungy blues-rocker, and the guys and I had played it quite a bit live before we went to the studio with it. So we have a clear sense of the vibe we wanted. Musically it's a very simple song, and we really got into the groove of the thing. When Ryan Benthall added the organ parts, well, it's kind of a banger (to my mind anyway). Brian McRae's drumming really rocks as well.
When I went to release it as a single I didn't have any fancy concept in mind, so I took all outtakes from live video, studio video, whatever I had and strung it together. I take a lot of goofy video, so there was plenty to work with. I even had some live vid of us doing the song, so it was fun to have some stuff that actually synched (sort of). When you're a one man operation, you make do with what you have. The thing you do imperfectly is always better than the thing you didn't do at all.
I put this song out as a single about a year and a half ago, so you can watch the video or stream it on Spotify (link above), or even better, pre-order the album on CD or vinyl. If you do pre-order you can get an exclusive release t-shirt to go with your new album. All physical media ships at the start of July. So you'll get it before anyone else! You can also get one of the exclusive shirts if you buy a release show ticket. The show is July 18 in Longmont. So do that.