Singled Out: Smash Palace's Do It Again

The inspiration for the song "Do It Again" from the new Smash Palace CD "Do It Again" had to do with reminiscing about the past and those musical events in your life that shape who you are and the music you play and write.

I wrote all the songs on the new CD with my brother Brian. Our usual routine is, he's playing drums and I'm playing guitar and we just jam around and come up something that we like musically. No lyrics, just a hummable tune. When we start creating lyrics, we'll just open up and let the words come. Back and forth we'll go till one of us comes up with a line that we both like and we'll take it from there.

On "Do It Again", I kept singing the line " That was back in '64" and we liked the way it sounded. Then we talked a bit about the year 1964 and all the Beatles and remembering the first time we heard them on the radio. We're brothers, Brian and I, and I remember getting up for school in the morning and our transistor radio was playing, and Brian telling me about these guys from England with long hair and the song " I Want To Hold Your Hand" sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before.
After seeing The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I was relentless about wanting a guitar and bugging my mom to buy me one. The first verse of "Do It Again" was about that experience.
Once we had that done, we plotted out the rest of the song: why not write it about those big musical moments in our life. The next verse was about The Stones and Mick in '69 and how he really became the first big arena size rock star. At least to me he was. The top hat, the strutting and jumping around on the stage and how rock n roll had changed. It wasn't about pop music so much anymore. It was changing with the Vietnam War and politics. It was a scary time worrying about getting drafted and sent to some war in a far off land.

The last verse is about our CBGB days in NYC. When our first band Quincy, went to NYC ( we're a New Jersey band) and how the music we heard knocked us out. Music was pretty bland in the mid to late 70's. Disco was king and most rock bands were so corporate and laid back that I had little interest in their music. I felt so out of it musically till I went to NYC and saw all those New Wave and Punk bands. Changed my musical world.

I guess we could have kept on writing verse after verse because lots of great music has come along since then but I wanted to write a 3 minute rock n roll song, not a 10 verse Bob Dylan song.

It's a different type of song for Smash Palace. More groove oriented and more bluesy than our other stuff. It's all part of my DNA. Cut my musical teeth playing all that white English blues stuff so it all comes from that I suppose.