Finest Worksong

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

The first day all four of us actually got together to begin working on new material wasn’t until several days later. At three o’clock in the afternoon we gathered in the basement with my stack of cassettes and scribbled lyrics. I don’t know why I was surprised to find Ziggy there with a notebook. He’d written occasional lyrics or choruses before, whenever Bart or I got stuck or when a song really needed something else. In my own stack I had the note he’d left me in New York, one verse of “Windfall” complete in it. What did I expect? I don’t know.

That first day was rough going. Something was changing and shifting right out from under my feet, I felt, and no one was on firm ground anymore. Even Bart and I were clashing rather than meshing, even when we had the chord progression set out. By dinner time Chris pointed out that maybe the three of us ought to work some things out first, and then bring him back in when we were really ready to go full volume. He went and got Vietnamese take out from the place down the street and after we had eaten, me and Bart and Ziggy sat on the matted, thick orange rug in the basement and tossed things back and forth. We put a couple of sketches onto cassette tape with Christian’s boom box and called it quits around midnight. I wasn’t sleepy, but I went to bed anyway, tired and sapped of energy.

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