Lyric Story Stream How A Song Came About

I want to write a song for other musicians so I pretended to write a song for a great local group, Rigometrics. They’re a keyboard playing poppy Greta Van Fleet band with a powerful guitar and vocals. They’ve been growing in popularity in New England over the past few year and aren’t far from expanding into the rest of the world. If you get a chance to see them, you should. They rock with energy.

So I wrote a few songs as if I was writing for their band. One song is called “Rolling with the Punches” about the band taking the plunge and putting there show on the road. At one show, I talked with the guitarist’s Mom who said they loved that bus, but it was in pretty bad shape. So that was inspiration for a Led Zeppelin-esque blues song.

The chorus ended with a line, “no use trying to stop us ’cause we’re already gone” When I was singing to make a recording I found that line very weak. How could I say that better? I wanted a metaphor. Which leads to another thought stream.

I’ve been reading Bob Spitz’ biography about Led Zeppelin (great read), and one of their many inspirations was Lightnin’ Hopkins. I wanted to listen to him because the book I was reading talked about how Hopkins hammered bottle caps to his shoes to get a shuffle when he played, and I’ve been trying to get a good rhythm groove sound when I play live (still working on that). So thanks to the ability to listen to almost any song, any time I want, I listened to some Lightnin Hopkins. And viola, one of his songs is “Gone like a turkey in the Corn” I love that simile.

I’ll probably change it to “gone like a shadow on the sun” or “the dark in the dawn” or “comet through the sky”.

Now I like the song. I still need to record it, and then I’ll probably be too chicken to share it with the Rigometrics.