Story Behind the Song: I'll Be Waiting

Greetings Awesome Internet People!

Happy Aloha Friday from Hawaii! Continuing on with my daily "story behind the song" posts, and wrapping up for the week, we are at track number 5 from my album "Legacy", which is "I'll Be Waiting".

If you give "I'll Be Waiting" a casual listen, you'd probably think it's a pretty straight ahead guitar rock song. That's a reasonable assumption. However, when I wrote this song, I didn't even touch a guitar. All of the guitar that you hear in the song was originally synthesizers. Fortunately, I came to my senses and used the right tool for the job -- I never ended up recording the synthesizer version, as even my earliest demos of the song made it pretty clear that the melody belonged on guitar.

The name "I'll Be Waiting" refers to the feeling of being ready and waiting for when the person you love has finally decided to return to you. I was inspired by several of the Romantic Era British novels I was reading in the late 1990s, including Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights".

As the original version of this song was written all on synthesizers, the original arrangement was very densely packed with dozens of synthesizer parts. It made for an interesting soundscape, but ultimately, I felt like the thick arrangement did more to distract from the melody than to support it.

When it came time to redo "I'll Be Waiting" my goals were to make the arrangement much thinner, and to make the song even more of a guitar rock song. To that end, I got rid of the original intro section that was a swirling ambient synthesizer soundscape, and I replaced it with an AC/DC-influenced guitar riff, played on my wife's beautiful blue Ibanez guitar. All in all, I dramatically reduced the synth presence and focused on elements that supported the melodic components of the song.

Trivia: there is a repeating chord in every chorus that is literally the most dissonant and "wrong" chord I could have chosen. I did this on purpose to give the chorus a bit of an unsettling feeling -- and also just to see if I could do it without anyone noticing. 😈

So that's it for this week! I'll continue with the "story behind the song" posts next week.