The upcoming jam...

We've been thinking about it for a month or two and have been stewing a few old ideas and sauteing a few new ones.

Our weekend meet-up is just a few weeks away and I've been awash with the remembrances of the struggle of the creative process. I have these two songs that I'm working on, one old, one new, as we had arranged. The old one is kind of typical, nothing special--it kind of has a Cure-ish twinge. I'm struggling with the melody and the lyric, so Jon's going to give it a spin. The collaboration potential is exciting for me.

It's the second one that's got me kind of perplexed. Blooming from a three-part harmony intro bit, drenched in reverb and Fleet-Foxy in-my-mind, when I got to the business of actually writing the song, I got thinking about road songs...

For some reason, road tunes have always really resonated with me, starting with James Taylor. "Sweet Baby James" is a favorite and more recently I've really loved this version of his tune "Traveling Star." A few other tunes come to mind: "Golden" by My Morning Jacket and John Mayer's "Stop this Train" topped my list of most-listened-tos last year.

Anyway, I had all that road-song stuff floating around and that with my recent foray into the blue, bluegrass, I wrote a bunch of roadie-sounding lyrics to the tune I'd been thinking about. Here's the thing, though: when I put them to music, what came out didn't really sound "Only Anything"--it didn't sound bluegrassy either. Instead, it sounded... um, (brace yourself, fans) like a country song.

I've been feeling pretty self-conscious about it. Jon T.'s new tunes sound so classic and classy... so totally OA.

On, the other hand, I am confident that with a band behind it, my tune might lose its country vibe and evolve to something a bit more... or rather, a bit less Kenny Chesney.