Singled Out: Jim Bianco's Sinners

Songwriting is usually a process. It's very rare for me that a song arrives all at once. It's mostly a painstaking operation consisting of a small but intense obsession with a melody, or a song topic, or both- and then a dragged-out process of attempting to twist, turn and manipulate words, syllables, meanings, phases and imagery.

But every so often, there is a song that just lands on your lap. The melody falls from the sky, the lyrics float down right after it, and VIOLA! You've got a song. No pain. No frustration. No twisting and manipulating. It just comes to you and you're done.

My song 'SINNERS' did just that.

I was at a 10-day silent retreat ( ostensibly 'retreating' from drinking, smoking, talking sh*t, eating like sh*t, screwing strangers and partying with my idiot friends.) It was day 5 and the whole song just hit me. Boom.

I wrote the chorus first- then about 5 verses to follow. The most difficult part was, seeing that it was a silent retreat, I wasn't allowed to sing. And because the silent retreat required you not only to abstain from talking, but from writing too, there was no pen or paper anywhere.

I sat and sang all the words in my head to a melody that I hadn't actually heard yet. I had to wait 5 days until I drove home, picked up the guitar and sang the chorus out loud, figured out the chords underneath, and ultimately finished the song.

The most ironic part is that, while on a retreat where I was abstaining from all things unhealthy, I wrote a song about drinking, smoking and screwing.

You can take the musician out of the lifestyle, but you can't take the lifestyle out of the musician.