not california

i was chatting with v the other day, and she asked me about how i write songs. she asked me at one point what the fastest song i ever wrote was, and i didn't even have to think about it before responding "not california". i actually wrote it while i was working on my first record, and i was sort of floundering for a title for the record. i had 12 songs, and was going to leave it at that, and then one day i wrote "not california", tacked it on the end of the record, and named the whole thing after it, too.

the song itself was written in somewhere between 5-10 minutes in my office the day after my girlfriend at the time and i split up. i hadn't really been thinking about it since it happened because there was a lot of other stuff conveniently going on, and, well, i didn't want to think about it. i was waiting for a friend of mine to finish up something she was working on so that we could go to lunch, and all of a sudden the melody and the lyrics both just kind of came out on paper. i think it's one of the more "poppy" songs i've written, definitely one of the most straightforward, but i still like it because it means a lot to me.

i don't usually promote myself on here, but if you want to hear the song, you can to here:
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~bbunting/

there are two versions on there, the original studio version (which isn't bad, but it's old and i like to think i sound a lot better now), and the live version (which i like better). it's a little rough; though the band sounds good, it's hard to hear them, and the vocal harmonies suffered a bit on account of it being the first time ever that we tried to do them. but it was really fun playing that show that night, and it's actually my ex-girlfriend (from the story) singing the harmonies. so it was a special music moment, though it might not shine all that much in musical terms :)