Q: is there a story behind "i just did a bad thing"? if so,, what is it?
A: i have 2 stories. one is about the way it was selected, and the other story is about the chorus almost being cancelled. For the song selection, i was using my standard song selection technique, which is to go through all my potential songs, and pick the ones i'm most excited about doing, and put them in a list. i came up with about 30 choices. THEN, this is where i made the mistake: i went around that final list a second time, to try to remove the ones i don't really want, and be left with only the best. The problem is, one by one i found reason to eliminate all of them. Maybe some of them felt too similar to a recent song.... maybe some of them felt too slow... maybe some of them felt too fast.... maybe some were too happy... maybe some of them felt like they would be too boring.... maybe some of them felt like they would be too crazy.... But i eliminated every single one. This is not what's supposed to happen. this is a fear driven situation i found myself in. Really, the important thing to remember when doing the song selection, is that truly any choice can work. Because most of the writing is still ahead, and the entire production is still ahead, and any song, if it's made it to that first list, it has more than good enonugh potential to be turned into something great. But here i was, being so particular that i had actually removed every song from the list. So, in a fit of rage, i un-removed all of them, and very quickly chose one that seemed like the weakest one, which was only 1 line at the time ("just did a bad thing"). Not knowing anything else about that song, which way it could go, not knowing what the 'bad thing' is, ... but it seemed to relate to the situation at hand, and i knew the antidote to this conundrum would be to choose something on a whim that was mostly unknown, just like this one. so that's why i made that choice. then i continued the writing from there, using my standard songwriting procedures and practices. The story behind the first chorus (the "game" section), is this: When i first launched into that section (coming up with half or maybe all of it), i was excited to have something like this, but then after a few more play-throughs i started to feel like that section really doesn't belong in this song. So i actually filed that away as a different song, and tried to continue forward (from 'cancelled') to see what else i can do instead. What else i found wasn't any better, so i eventually had to decide that the "game" section is the best option