October 20, 2026
Quiet songs, loud songs
I write two kinds of songs, and I've stopped pretending they come from the same mood.
Some songs want to be quiet. They want a guitar and a voice and a porch, and they get worse every time you add something. Those are the ones I put out under my own name.
And some songs want a drummer. They show up with a chorus that's already too big for the room, a groove that wants to be felt in your chest, and a feeling that they were never going to fit on a porch. Those are the ones that belong to the band.
The trick, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit, is to stop trying to talk a song out of what it already is. If it wants to be loud, let it. If it wants to be a whisper, leave it alone. You don't get a better song by forcing a quiet one to stomp or a loud one to tiptoe.
Some of the songs on the new album started out as quiet ones, and we're hearing what they want to be with a whole band behind them. That's part of the fun. A song you know can turn out to have been bigger than you realized.