happy tunesday! do you think of me now and again (the marc whinston project)

 

Continuing with the tracks from my album, Track number six is "Do You Think of Me (Now and Again)"

For reference, previous entries in this series were:

• about the album as a whole;
• about track 1;
• about track 2;
• about track 3;
• about track 4;
• about track 5;

Years ago -- I'm gonna guess about fifteen years ago -- I was working late. Waiting for some information from my interlocutor at another company, I started going through piles of paper -- fighting excess paper is a never-ending struggle for me. I came across a picture of someone I had once been close to. She represented a chapter of my life that had closed. It brought back a lot of memories. Some happy. Some -- not so. Overcome with curiosity, I turned to the internet and Googled her name.

A song idea hit me. And I quickly thought of some lyrics:

Do you Google me now and again

Do your fingers hit the keyboard when

Something frees your memories

Do you Google me now and again.

Often I come up with a bit of lyrics or a song idea, I struggle to take it anywhere. In this case, I played with lyrics, coming up with a lot of lines that related a dead romance to the internet and social media. Nothing felt right. And at some point I decided to drop the internet angle in favor of the chorus that I have now:

Do you think of me now and again

Do feelings come flooding back when

Something frees your memories

Do you think of me now and again.

And still I struggled to take it anywhere. I came up with a bridge, but that was it.

At some point I started writing a story song, describing a breakup. But it was too long -- fifteen or so verses describing, in agonizing detail, an old relationship.* That was about the time that I was slowly figuring out the value of brevity in a song. Leave out some details and let the listener use his or her imagination. But I was still struggling to come up with a khop.

One morning, riding the subway to work and listening to music, I got to Billy Ray Cyrus' "Words by Heart" and realized that I was mining the same subject matter -- or similar subject matter at least. And that was when verses started coming to me. I made some progress, but still was uncertain of what we had. I approached a friend, Scott Milner to see if he would work with me on completing it. And he did advance the whole thing a bit. If I recall correctly, he came up with the passage, "Just a funny mood or a time of day / Like wanting a smoke, can't seem to put it away."

I don't remember the exact sequence of events, but I remember spending time with him in a studio in Hamilton Montana (near where he was living at the time), and we eventually had two similar demos. The lyrics were slightly different, and they were in different keys. They were slower than I liked -- Scott and I have different sensibilities. But I thought we had a good song.

A few years later, Eric Goulden (AKA Wreckless Eric) and Amy Rigby were running a kickstarter to fund their next album (which would become A Working Museum), they offered as an incentive, to record a song with a donor. I misunderstood them. That incentive was aimed at working musicians who wanted someone to produce for them. I thought they were offering to record a cover of a song -- for a fan who wanted to hear them perform, say, "House of the Rising Sun." Though they hadn't intended to offer what I thought they had, they were gracious and agreed to record one of the songs I wrote (or cowrote). For some reason I decided on this song that Scott and I had written -- probably because I wanted something faster.

When it came to recording, though, they identified a few things they didn't like about the song. They changed some of the lyrics here and there. I think that their changes were improvements -- for the most part, anyway. But the biggest change they made was the melody for the bridge. What I had written was barely different than the verses. They came up with something very different. And really good. I asked Eric if he and Amy wanted songwriting credits. He answered in the affirmative. And so, I have now co-authored a song with one of my musical idols from my high school years.** For reference, here's a lyric video I made of Eric and Amy's version.

Dig that bass...I'll admit I like their version better than the one on the album I put out. But I don't own the commercial rights to their recording.

Anyway, when it came to recording this, I don't think Toby got the vocals quite right, so I asked him to give Tim Patterson a go at it.

"Do You Think of Me (Now and Again)"
Song by: Marc Whinston, Eric Goulden, Scott C. Milner and Amy Rigby
Lead vocal by Tim Patterson
All instruments and backing vocals by Toby Wilson
Arranged and Produced by Toby Wilson for Tobias Wilson Music, Ltd.

________________________________________________________

*Not that you're asking, but it was fictionalized, with the narrative driven more by a need for rhymes than by actual memories.

**I still have vivid memories of teen youth group trips, playing Wreckless Eric songs on my boombox. His gravelly voice and strong accent elicited puzzlement from my friends, but I loved his music and didn't care that my friends didn't think it was cool. A few years earlier (and a couple thousand miles farther East) and they would have loved him.