She Wants Revenge Singled Out Week: Must Be The One

Must be the one is a song that started in a strange way. Normally when Adam and I sit down to write it begins with a beat, then he picks up the bass and I pick up the guitar and we improvise until something special happens. At that point we usually record it if we're not already recording, then move onto the next section of music, whether it's a verse, chorus or bridge. It usually comes pretty fast, and if it doesn't that's usually a sign that we should move on. We seldom labor over it, as our experience and history has shown us that good things come fast for us in the writing process. There are of course times when we sit down and take our time talking about key, chord structures and trying various things back and forth, but generally the songs begin in a sort of let's say....automatic-writing style, as I despise the word, "jamming".

With this song however I had a few lyric and chord ideas in my head and it was just a matter of getting it down and making sense of it. For this album a lot of the lyrics were sung in the car while driving around Los Angeles with the instrumentals playing, and when inspiration would strike I'd record the melodies into my iphone. I first came up with the beginning of the verse and knew what the first few lines of the song would be, next I found myself singing, "must be the sun" over and over, and while I knew the words were stupid and just a sketch of the rhythm and melody, it was still stuck in my head for days. At some point I went in the studio to try and put something down, and that's when I replaced Sun with One and the story took shape and tied into the beginning I'd been toying with.

The second part was the after-chorus tag, "She says I don't need anyone, no I don't need anyone, but you". I'd written that down on a piece of paper and needed to find chords to fit it, so when I explained my idea for the song to Adam and showed him what I had so far, he came up with the sad chord change under the tag that to me really made the chorus into something special. I showed him the other parts I had and told him a chord idea, and then it was a matter of piecing it all together, which happened fairly easily. We sat down and came up with the chords and structure almost immediately, Adam taking the idea and expanding on it, at which point we programmed the beat, laid down bass and guitar and started building from there.

The last piece of the puzzle was the bridge bassline, which to me really is the peak of the song in scope and sonics, and funnily enough it was listening to the song in the final mix when Adam looked at me and said, "I wanna re-record the bridge bassline, I have an idea". That's now my favorite part of the song, and it's something he did literally right before we mastered the song.