Singled Out: The Scorch Sisters' Bad Dreams

04-12-2019

LA based all-female blues trio The Scorch Sisters singer and keyboardist Alicia Morgan tells us about their song "Bad Dreams". Here is the story:

As a member of the female blues band The Scorch Sisters, this is a song I brought to the band. At the time I wrote it, I was doing a project with Kevin Murphy of Rufus. I had arrived in Los Angeles a year before, having left behind a long-term relationship and a band in Florida, both of which had been going nowhere for some time. So I dropped the ultimatum - I wanted a future with my boyfriend or I was moving on. The boyfriend, of course, said that he "didn't want to hold me back" and didn't want to leave Florida, so I sold everything I owned and my best friend and I moved out to LA sight-unseen.

I loved LA. There was so much creativity and music there, and I was already starting to find out who I was as a musician, playing with other people, writing songs. And after three months, the boyfriend called me and begged me to come back and we could get engaged. But by that time, I was so happy doing what I loved that I was not coming back to Florida, and he was not going to move out to LA, so that was that. Six months after that, I found out that he had gotten married to someone else - a girl who had been kind of stalking him the whole time we were together.

Well, that pretty much crushed me. But I was working on a recording project, doing my own music, and the loss of the relationship gave me plenty to write about. I learned was that there had been warning signs for a long time that I had ignored in my determination to keep us together. I thought if only I changed myself enough that we could live "happily ever after." What I didn't see was that he just didn't care enough to make the effort. Once I had gotten a headache so bad that I needed to be hospitalized, but all he cared about was that the band would be out of work for a week, and wanted me to go to the hospital when I could check out every night and play, and then check back in after the gig. The really sad thing is that I went along with it. I wanted to be loyal and 'take one for the team'. Later on, I realized that that loyalty was completely misplaced.

I wrote "Bad Dream" because of the signs that were there all along that I ignored, but nevertheless there were the subconscious messages, trying to get my attention. Even though we didn't have the 'bad breakup' and got along fine while we were together, the truth was that he would not bother to throw me a life preserver if I was drowning.

Kevin Murphy and I made the original track as a funky sort of 12/8 clavinet groove, but when I brought it to the Scorch Sisters I felt that a deep Texas blues shuffle with burning guitar and B3 would be more in line with the meaning of the song.

The good news is that I thank my lucky stars that the ex-boyfriend didn't marry me, because I would have spent a miserable lifetime trying to live up to someone else's expectations. The girl he married did me the greatest favor of my life in swooping in and scooping him up. I met and married an amazing guy who adores me exactly as I am. I learned to listen to my intuition, and that's what inspired "Bad Dream".

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the group right here!