Mostly Rain

You knew it was coming: a blog post about “Mostly Rain”, which is Single #2 of 3 in the lead-up to the release of Megaturquoise. In case you’re wondering about logistical details, it dropped last Thursday like a fat, errant raindrop directly onto your face, and you can find it in all of the usual locations (Apple Music, Spotify) and even a few unusual locations that you probably haven’t thought of (Bandcamp, if you feel like looking up lyrics and/or owning my music outright for a dollar like it’s 2006; Soundcloud, if you want to remix my shit with a trap beat).

Mostly Rain sounds like it’s about weather, but if you think hard enough about the title (or actually listen to the lyrics), you may think you cracked the codex and caught what everyone else has missed: that Mostly Rain is an allegory for COVID-19, the nightmare of being stuck indoors during 2020, etc. You’d be wrong, of course, but I bet that had you feeling pretty smart. In fact, I wrote Mostly Rain in January of 2020, back when global pandemics were just a twinkle in Drumpf’s eye, and I had no idea that the song would have the opportunity to take on any additional prescience, whether earned and intentional or completely coincidental. It was raining a ton back in January 2020 - like, unseasonable bucketloads of never-ending rain - but you probably don’t remember that anymore, because, again…global pandemic. With our new, battle-worn post-2020 perspectives, it’s funny to think that a little extra water from the sky seemed like anything of real consequence. We were so very young and foolish.

Speaking of being young (and getting old), the lyrics in Mostly Rain aren’t REALLY about weather either - that just seemed like a good jumping off point to spin up some short fiction about being stuck working a dead-end job and living in a dump in California with no real future planned out. That’s not a life that I’ve personally lived, but it felt like a fun one to explore.

Musically, Mostly Rain represents some uncharted territory for me. Over the course of my life, I’ve listened to bucketloads of country music; plenty of folky (folksy?) singer-songwriter…songs; and, eh, maybe not all that much “Americana”, but a little bit, I guess; and my history with those genres has carved out plenty of space in my heart for the lap steel. This song, with its whiff of organic-ness, really demanded that sort of instrumentation, so I tapped Atlanta’s Ben Holst of 800 East and Tunewelders to drop in swoony lap steel and subtly crunchy electric guitar tracks. Deke, as always, provided the bass; Deke’s bass tracks tend to be earworms on their own (not an easy thing to do with a bass part) and, anecdotally, this one in particular tends to stick in heads nearly as much as the actual vocal hooks (I say anecdotally, but my experience has been the same).

I don’t have an embarrassingly rough demo to share of Mostly Rain, probably because this is the last song I recorded for Megaturquoise and representative of me doing a better job with the Write Song —> Record Song process; my MO used to look more like Write Song —> Sit on Song for 5+ Years —> Record Inferior Version of Song —> Tweak for 2-3 Years —> Shelve Indefinitely.

What I can share with you, though, is another sneak preview of the single art “Part of This”, which is Single #3 and comin’ atcha (soon!) on May 27th:

I’m pretty into the way this art turned out because a) I love the aesthetic of palm trees, and b) color-wise, it ties the art for the previous two singles together so that these three single drops feel somewhat cohesive.

Maybe even more importantly: Part of This (the song, not the art) features TRUMPETS, baby.