Bret Alexander-Paul Smith-Ron Simasek

UNCOMMONLY BLUE (listen to MP3 sample)

THE SONG: Songwriting is kind of an ongoing work in progress. Sometimes you write every day and other times not so much. Willie Nelson said that the only time he writes is when he needs a song for something or when a song won't leave him alone. At the time we were recording what would become "Perfect Smile", Mike Naydock (my co-writer of many years) and I were getting into hacking out phrases that we liked from some of our discarded songs. We had "the patron saint of dried up pens" and "I'll start smoking again/It's only just a question of when" and a few other simple lines. One afternoon (cue the sitars and the lava lamp) I was standing outside in a sun shower looking up into a clear blue sky at a rainbow. I came up with this hippy, trippy chorus "I've seen beauty in my mind/Makes the world look colorblind". The next day I got a bunch of verses without a chorus in the mail from Mike. Working title: "Uncommonly Blue". The rest fell into place. This one is a song collage really. Just a bunch of ideas and images stacked on top of each other. I tell people it is about "potential". Actually I don't have a clue.

THE RECORDING: I think we were listening a lot to Steve Earle's "Transcendental Blues" when we recorded this. At the time, he was really into this roots rock "Revolver-esque" sort of sound that we loved to death. On Uncommonly Blue, there is a sitar, mellotron, pedal steel, accordion, and distorted harmonica as well as the standard guitar/bass/drums fare. But the song comes off as a fairly straight up rock thing. The Beatles (especially John Lennon) were incredibly good at making a dense and complicated arrangement easy to digest. So a 5 year old could sing and dance along, but a serious adult listener could find substance there too. We try and achieve that with everything we do. We also have to give credit to Dave Goodermuth who mixed the record. He did a great job making sense of everything in the final stages.

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