About a song: Shark (1)
Category: Music

"Shark" came to me around 2003, and as soon as I heard it, I knew I had the opening track to an album. I have another, older song that screams "opening track" but upon completing the lyrics, the first track on the first album had to be this one. It had to be.

I love intros. Guns n Roses in "Appetite for Destruction" has always impressed me, for such a raw hard rock band, they always seemed to have perfect song intros. All 12 or so songs on that album. Any of them can serve as an opening track to an album (though "Welcome to the Jungle" definitely takes the prize). My intros are not quite as ingenious, I'm afraid, but they do build -- I hope you go to my web site and listen to my music there, as I did chop off the extended intro from the version that's here on MySpace.

There are many things I love about "Shark." Its main riff is so simple, yet has this gnarly sound to it that sounds fresh to me. The chorus is also simple yet catchy, and it totally reminds me of recent work from King's X, one of my all-time heros. The bridge is surprisingly playful, making this sort of a disarming kind of opening track -- its humor is a bit of antithesis to what follows.

You notice that most of my songs feature guitar solos. That's my hard rock influence poking through -- very traditional. I'm primarily a guitar player, so solos are obviously very important to me -- and this one is a killer. I actually played that solo in 2003, when I was demoing this song. It's all one take (though it wasn't the first take) and completely improvised. I heard it and my jaw dropped. I haven't been able to play anything better since -- so I had to use this take for this album. That's why this song features guitars and bass in standard tuning, as opposed to half-step down on the rest of the album: to be able to reuse this guitar solo.

I'm very happy with the way it came out, and how it sits as the opening track. It is designed to be a bit of a shock, and people who know me personally listened to it with their eyes and mouth open wide. A number of people have said that they never expected my music to sound like this.

Mission accomplished.