Singled Out: Royal Canoe

I find that it's usually difficult to "plan" a songwriting session that generates quality material unless there's a certain amount of spontaneity involved. We found ourselves in one of those situations in June when we gave ourselves a really short window of time (at least for us) to write and record a couple "summery?" tracks that we wanted to release while it was still hot outside. Somehow the first two ideas we worked on ended up sticking, which was nice. "Show Me Your Eyes" was built around a loop a couple of us made after filling our drum pad sampler with some pretty unrelated samples from my iTunes: the drum hits are cut from Led Zeppelin, the piano note from a John Cage recording, the guitar chords are pitched and reassembled from a CCR intro and the bass note is pulled from a classical piece that I can't remember. We just passed the pad back and forth, trying ideas, until we realized we had something pretty exciting. If you solo each part separately, the sounds all seem to be coming from different places and from different keys, but together they work.

We often fret over really insignificant parts for days and got caught up in minutiae, for better or worse. But for this song after that initial loop was written the rest of the song was completed without a lot of second guessing. Our songwriting is more a matter of finding a collection of sounds and textures that create a vibe then picking chords and jamming. We've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years trying to flesh out this process and there was an organic nature to the way things came together on this track that was encouraging to us.