Happy Thursday, Awesome Internet People!
Today is installment #4 of my daily "story behind the song" postings. Today's song is named after and dedicated to my beautiful wife Marci.
As is rock tradition, this love song is a bit more of a ballad-tempo, and the intro to this song hints at the fact that even though I identify more with being a guitarist, I'm still a sucker for a nice piano part. In fact, the entire song blossomed out of this piano part in the intro.
When I wrote the original version of this song, it actually had no melody -- it was more of a U2-style long echo-y texture on guitar, but over the same chord changes that you hear in the new version. It was pretty and the texture was nice, but I never really felt like it conveyed what I really felt. The original also had kind of an obnoxious and out-of-place funky slapped bass guitar track. I replaced that with a more appropriate long, sustained bass guitar part.
With the new version, I stripped down the arrangement a bit so that it was really just a couple keyboard parts (i.e., humanly playable by one person), bass guitar, and drums as a foundation. As with "Spheres", since I didn't have a melody set in stone yet, I mixed a version of this "naked" version of the song so that I could improvise melodic ideas until I found "the right one". Unlike "Spheres", the melody for "Marci" came to me much easier -- I think having such an inspirational mate/love/companion/spouse/friend/all-of-the-above-and-more made the melody flow from my guitar organically.
One hold over from the original is the "epic" guitar solo. While the original had little in the way of melody for either of the verses or choruses, it did have this guitar solo which I felt was quite melodic, and fit the chord changes very nicely.
A bit of trivia: the guitar noodling at the ending of "Marci" features the only real "one-take", "off-the-cuff" improvisation on the whole album. I didn't plan a single note of it; we just hit record and I played.
So that's the story of my ode to my Marci 💕💕.
I'll have one more song for you all tomorrow, and I'll take a break for the weekend.
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