Welcome to September! Kicking off this month is one of my favorite songs, by one of my favorite bands, with one of my favorite musician pals. Today we have "The Worst Part" by Motion City Soundtrack.

I've been extremely vocal about my long time fandom of Motion City, seeing them for the first time at the Busch Campus center on October 27th, 2002, and never looking back since. They were one of the only shows I went to this year, and I'm genuinely thankful for that. If I was going to be left with minimal musical memories in 2020, having them be one is such a wonderful thing.

This song, in my opinion, has been criminally overlooked, since it was never on a proper studio album release. "The Worst Part" was originally found on the Sound of Superman soundtrack for Superman Returns, and later was on the Deluxe Edition of 'Even if it Kills Me', which is my second favorite record of theirs (right behind 'I Am the Movie'. You never forget your first!). I feel like a lot of people laud Motion City for their pop hooks, fun lyrics and energetic live shows, which is totally deserved, but I've found that the sadder songs are some of my most cherished (no surprise there really), like "Hold Me Down" "Even if it Kills Me" and "Happy Anniversary". When I heard this for the first time I was floored. It just had such an atmosphere, an awesome drum part, and was bursting with heart. I fell in love and would continue to go back to it all the time. I even tried to make this song once before, when I first had the ability to multi-track, but it was not good (haha).

The making of this song was a bit of a roller coaster, emotionally speaking. I knew I wanted to maintain the drum part because it's so important to the song. If you straighten it out, the song loses some feeling, and that's not how I'd like to honor a band who means so much to me. That being said, it's really hard for me to play. REALLY FUCKING HARD. Tony Thaxton (who was gracious enough to give me his blessing to do this) is so god damn good at his instrument, and I admire him greatly, but I just couldn't nail the ghost notes on the snare. I could either play the song well without them, or be a disaster trying to have them in there, and that literally made me depressed. I didn't know what to do; I didn't want to fail. I even considered trying to double track the drums to combine two parts, but that didn't really work. Finally, I realized I could fill out the part with a little additional percussion, and it would maintain the feel a little bit better. Once I cleared that hurdle, it was fairly smooth sailing.

I was fortunate enough to have my friend, Erik Romero, on this song. Erik is an amazing producer, songwriter, and musician in his own right, and I was lucky enough to play in his old band, dollys, for a short period of time. Erik even produced my song "Sun Goes Down", as well as a number of awesome records by friends and colleagues. He currently plays in stillhungry and The Front Bottoms, and just released a song called "Poison Myself" from his own project, Light Sleeper. Bottom line, the dude is a god damn beast.

When I sent Erik the song list for this project, this was the one he jumped at, which definitely made me happy, because as I mentioned before, it's not super well known. I had a really awesome time working on it with him as well. This was the first time that I could look at a collaborator and I didn't have an immediate plan for our individual roles. It's mostly by random circumstance that I even played any other instrument than drums on this one, but we decided on Erik doing the bass, and some textural synths to give the song some added atmosphere. Erik is a monster on bass, and so creative, that he really made this song lock in with his track, and the synths added just the right amount of tension and emotion to the spots he chose.

For my parts, I did what I normally do for these tracks: I go looking for live videos to see what the individual players are doing. To my surprise, there was a capo I didn't see coming, and some back and forth that I never fully heard. I used my Nash tele, because it was only right to do Justin Pierre's parts with a humbucker tele, and used the Epiphone Spirit for an additional rhythm guitar, since Josh Cain has that amazing SG Jr. Some additional parts were layered with my Black Falcon, like the little delay lead, and the little riff in the break before the outro, and I bounced between my Roaring-40 and Slick-18. I also used a nice piano plugin, that came with my interface, for some background chords, and unintentionally found some more appealing chord voicings than I intended on playing.

I want to send a huge thank you to everyone who donated in August to The Trevor Project. I was able to send them $80, again rounding up a little, which is just really cool to know that I can do even a little more than usual for something important. This month, all of the funds raised from the project will be going to The Brennan Center (www.brennancenter.org) who do a lot of great work protecting voting rights and democracy. It's very clear how important our coming election is, and how vital it is for us to come together and use our votes to cast out the evil that has taken root in our government. The Brennan Center is trying to make sure that nothing stops us from doing so, and if I can assist that quest, even a little bit like we've done for the last couple months, I'm happy to. Please check out their site if you'd like to learn more.

Well, enough of my rambling for today, enjoy your Labor Day weekend by having some snacks and remembering that workers are more important than CEOs or politicians, because we make everything happen. See you next week!