The Hardest Part of Wanting You

The hardest part of wanting you

Is having to pretend I don’t

Wanting you with me 

Needing to be beside you

Yearning to be inside your soul

The hardest part of burning for you

is never having a chance

Wishing you with me

Falling inside my feelings

Feeling the burning in my soul 

Why am I so tortured with my thoughts of you?

Am I supposed to come out with my feelings about you?

Oh, why can’t I accept that we aren’t to be?

And how can I go on each day without you by me?

The Backstory

    This song started as a project for a graduate class I was taking in 2017. I was supposed to generate a piece of original artwork and write about how it relates to the course content. The class I was taking was meant for visual art majors, but I was a music production major, so I had to make sure it was okay with my instructor to write and produce a song for the assignment. She enthusiastically approved my request, so I went to work, starting out with writing a guitar chord progression, and recording it into Logic Pro X. Then I added a bass line, liked where the song was going, so I programmed some drum tracks. I'm really, really picky about using electronic percussion and drum samples, so I ended spending literally weeks on tweaking the drum samples, quantization, velocity, signal chain, EQ, and reverb to make the programming sound as human as possible. It was no big deal, because I tend to mix songs on the fly, anyway. Next, I added an electric guitar melody on top, along the lines of something Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, or Neal Schon of Journey might have played. Once I had a basic intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-ending structure, I bounced a rough mix of it and submitted it as my class project. My instructor was absolutely THRILLED by how it sounded, and subsequently, I got an A in the class. Ironically, I can't even remember the name of the class I was taking.....😆

    Even though I was done with the class, I wasn't done with the song. The next thing I did was to add lyrics to the melody, and try to figure out how to approach the vocals. My first draft vocal take on the song was to sing it like Robert Lamm from early 1970's Chicago, but I ended up discarding that take, because I ended up sounding a little too MUCH like Lamm......way too much chest voice in the lower and middle registers. So I decided to approach the verses with a more delicate head voice to it, and I was concerned that I might have trouble hitting some of those mid-register notes in head voice, but I managed to pull it off. I ended up channeling 70's Gino Vannelli when I recorded the verses. The chorus, on the other hand, was always, ALWAYS meant to evoke a strong dynamic contrast to the verses. That section was done in in my upper register, and I HAD to use a strong chest voice to project the appropriate emotion and power the song needed. If the verse was Gino Vannelli, then the chorus was more Steve Walsh, a la 70's KANSAS. 

    The guitar solo took a while for me to finalize. I think I took longer on the solo than I did on the lead vocals. There was this lick I learned from late 70's/early 80's Neal Schon that I couldn't help but throw into the solo, and I ended up finishing the solo with a few Eddie Van Halen-esque quotes. If you're a fan of late 70's Van Halen, you might recognize what I'm talking about. 

    Oddly enough, the part of the song I spent the greatest amount of time working on were the background vocals. I think I spent the bulk of the summer of 2017 getting the harmonies right, not just with the phrasing and intonation, but with the right mix. There was this vocal music major I knew who was more than half my age that would message me every once in a while whenever she was panicking over a music theory assignment, and every once in a while, I would send her some rough mixes of just the vocal harmonies to get her input on them. I used her impressions to tweak the balance between the inner voices, and adjust the effects. She was my creative muse, and a source of inspiration. She still doesn't know about that, though.....

    I ended up finishing the song on or around August 31, 2017. I initially released this song through ReverbNation in September 2017. It was originally on iTunes, Amazon Music, Spotify, and all the other usual chains, but it's currently no longer in print. I finally decided to re-release it on YouTube yesterday, so the video link above is the one place you're guaranteed to find it, just in case. I hope you enjoy......

The Lyrics, and What They're About

    This song's lyrics are about something I have way more experience in than I care to admit: The Friend Zone. It's basically about having feelings for someone you're not really supposed to have feelings for, and pretending that you don't have them. Getting friend-zoned can happen for a variety of different reasons, but from my experience, it happens when both parties in a friendship are attracted to each other, but one of them isn't attracted enough to do anything about it. In the context of this song, she's actually the one who was interested in dating me, but I was having to keep her at arm's length, because I wasn't exactly available at the time. This is the exact reverse of pretty much every other time I had been previously thrust into the Friend Zone. Trust me when I tell you that having an attractive lady dangling her body in front of you like a carrot, and having to pretend you're not interested in having a bite was......not exactly pleasant. 😖