As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, sometimes I read a phrase somewhere or hear a line in a song which makes me think ‘nice idea, but they could have developed that so much further... wait, why don’t I do it?’. In this case it was a line from Phish song, The Squirming Coil. I think it’s fair to say that in many of their songs the lyrical content is very much secondary in importance to the intricacies and ebb and flow of the music, and on the whole this one is no exception. However, the lines
“...like Icarus, who had to pay
With melting wax and feathers brown
He tasted it on his way down”
seemed to be crying out for stretching into something more expansive. My favourite songwriting experiences are when the words and music develop simultaneously, and kind of meld together of their own accord. This was one of them. The descending chord sequences in the ‘spiralling down’ and guitar solo sections are a couple I’m particularly fond of.
I’ve been playing Icarus live for a few years now, but I only got round to recording it properly more recently. The outro jam pretty much wrote itself in the studio. Using the loop pedal is a good crowd-pleaser for live performances, but it’s great to be able to multi-track stuff properly on the computer and edit it afterwards. I just think about what each band-member in my imaginary multi-Jo supergroup would be doing in the jam, and do my best to emulate it.
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