Singled Out: Chokesetter's Motorboater

Keavin Wiggins | 11-01-2022

Album art

Chokesetter guitarist Steve Dickson tells us about the song "Motorboater", a track that comes from the band's first album, "Chokesetter I". Here is the story:

Ah, the leadoff track of our debut album. Where to begin? This was in the first batch of songs we wrote together, but the music was written entirely in a hotel room on the road a few years earlier. I had written the music and almost given it away as it didn’t fit the project I was doing at the time. I may have actually emailed it to someone to see if they wanted it. Good thing they didn’t! I don’t remember much about writing this except that it all came to me at once, changes and everything. I demoed it into GarageBand on my laptop and that was that. The intro to the bridge was originally guitar as I was working on some hybrid picking technique and threw it in for good measure. I tortured my bassist by throwing it to him to play as he didn’t see the point of the passage. I contend it gets you to the next part quite nicely :)

The thing I remember most about bringing the music to the band is that the structure is pretty close to exact when compared with the demo. This hasn’t happened since!

Everyone seems to think this song is about boobs and possibly gravitates to it for that reason. While you can’t fault anyone for that, our singer, Jessi has claimed to have written the lyrics as a tribute to Frank Zappa. I find it to be a little more autobiographical than that; he seems to be referring to a veteran musician, which all of us can identify as. With our dummer, Larry adding in his two cents at the end of the bridge (writing AND singing) it becomes moreso, “Makes me wanna be a better man so I can always wear the crown. Living life with a smiling face and a strut that always shows how I get down!”
Word.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the band here