As for the songs themselves, here's a little bit about each them.
She's the One
Along with "rock on the Bottom", this one of only two songs written specifically to fill an empty chapter in the album story, and written during the recording period of 2006-2009. I guess that makes it a bit ironic that it is the first song on the album. To tell the truth,it was great to get it finished at all, as I wasn't even sure I knew how to write a song any more at that point! Little did I know that it would turn into the cool "prog rock show piece" that it is. The ambitious chord progression during the solo breaks seemed to have a mind of its own ... it's a wonder I pulled it back in (go chromatic when you can't think of anything else LOL) .... and Rod and Andy both did great jobs working with my little musical adventure.
Anway, I needed to start the story somehow, and this was the answer. It needed to be about that first marriage, the immature infatuation aspect of it, and how I was so consumed that I couldn't see what was what or the obvious signs that "all was not well." As with all my songs, music comes first, and then I sort of sound out a melody and fit words to that. Despite that, knowing the subject of this one helped a lot and I had started singing the chorus in my head for months before I actually began working on the tune. It's a plus that it starts out with the attention-getting a-capella thing and is a high energy song that's ideal for an opening song for an album.
I Can't See the Reason
This started out as two songs. The chorus music was, again, something I had played for years since high school. The verse and synth/clav riffs I came up with while sitting around a studio in the early 80s (82/83 ?) goofing off on the keyboard during down time while my band at the time, Phoenix, was in cutting demos of covers for our promo packet. By the early nineties, I had combined the two into one song, and another band I was in, Ruckus, made some half-attempts at learning it to play out, but never to fruition.
The bridge/solo sections of this song were written as I was recording it. Similar to "She's the One", I have a way of working into all kinds of strange chord entanglements and then somehow finding a way back, and this is another perfect example. The organ solo was great fun, and Rod just nailed the guitar solo based on my request for "something like Terry Kath would play". The CODA at the end was also new, but was a deliberate attempt to get an early seventies vibe.
Pieces of My Heart
This is a special song. As the second song I initially recorded for this project, it had some significant flaws, so I re-sang it from scratch and did extensive re-mixing before going to mastering. "Pieces" is the most emotional and truly auto-biographical song on the album. It was written only months after my break-up and when I had left my home of Georgia to go out west and start a "new life."
This song is also the only one that was (really) performed live in any of my past bands. Go For Broke and later, Ruckus, played it out live over many years from around "89 - "96 and to great response most of the time. In fact we even recorded it a couple different times, and I have old versions of it, albeit with others singing it ... one male vocal and one female vocal version as a matter of fact.
Jammin' to Pieces
Well, this literally was recorded as a "one take jam" against some piano and drum-machine backing music, as I was trying to demonstrate my Korg CX3 sounds to some friends at at a recording forum. I later cleaned it up a bit and got Andy to put real drums on it. After recording Pieces of My Heart, this seemed to be a neat "counter" to that rather sad and emotional song, and being in the same key, it fit in nice as an almost CODA, coming in more or less on beat at the end of Pieces.
