Click here to listen to "Wait and Watch the Sky"!
One of the most frustrating things I've found in song writing is that one song can take days, months, or even years to develop and become what you want it to be while others take a couple hours and I end up loving that song as much as the one that took me days of painstaking work to do.
Only a few days after I had finished recording "Hope in the Lord", I was still in a music mood. I didn't want a big project like "Hope in the Lord", I just wanted something simple and fun. So I started flipping through my notebook where I keep physical handwritten copies of all my songs and scraps and slips of paper that I scribble ideas on to use later. I happened upon a sheet of notebook paper with four lines that had been scribbled out and covered up. Right under that mess of ink, I had jotted down four other lines:
"We will wait and watch the sky
Our hope will never die
Away on Your wings we'll fly!
You have given eternal life!"
I figured I'd give those words a shot. They made a good chorus for a short, simple song. I didn't have a tune, just those four lines. And to this day, I don't even remember when I wrote those first lines or what made me think of them. I figure it might have been a time when I was conceptualizing "Hope in the Lord" as they share the themes of hope and eternal life.
So I flipped on my microphone and quickly came up with a tune and recorded that chorus and the simple harmonies. But now I needed verses. So I wrote down the first thing that came to mind. Without editing, changing, or rewriting, the first verse, along with a tune in my head, appeared on the paper:
"The day will come when the Lord will call us home
And we will leave this earth no more to roam
To make sure Elijah's chariot don't pass us by
We will wait and watch the sky"
I kid you not, this took me maybe thirty seconds. The two subsequent verses took about the same amount of time. At this point, it was just fun for me. I wasn't worried about the ins and outs, I was just enjoying spitting out words that sounded good to me, and then recording them. And that's how this went. I stopped to record each verse as I wrote them. In just a couple hours, I had three verses and the choruses recorded. But there was no beat. There wasn't anything catchy about it. It was missing something. So I deleted the harmonies I had sung and used the harmony parts for some good ole country sounding "do-do's" and let the bass drive it all. Now I was really having fun. I even re-recorded the lead part just to give it a bit more color. When it was all said and done, I had created a nice little catchy tune. And it only took me four hours from start to finish.
"Wait and Watch the Sky" isn't my best song in terms of audio quality or depth of lyrics, but it is one of my most fun songs and I still enjoy listening to it. I just wish every song I wrote could come this easy and be this simple to record! If that was the case, I'd pumping out albums left and right!
- JB