Starting in the summer of 2018, I started a project for a new album. I had this idea of recording 10 or 12 songs live in my barn with a 6 or 7 piece band: trombone, sax, trumpet, guitar, bass, drums and maybe another horn, guitar, or keys... I'd used sampled horns in Logic Pro 7 for some songs like "here today", and I'd done Alman-Bros-like guitar parts in some other songs that were really imitating horns. I wanted to bring these songs to life with a live recording and great players --maybe only overdubbing vocals.

I played bass in Stuart Ross and the Temp Agency from 2016-2017 (Stuart's still going strong as Ross Hollow in the Indianapolis area!), and that band's instrumentation of drums, bass, guitar plus trombone, trumpet, and viola/violin was really inspiring! During the same time period, I also played bass in a reggae band called Ridim Vigil, and they had a trombone player. So the band in my head started having horn parts.

I built up a playlist of 10 new recordings, some old some new, some with lyrics, some without, over the summer and fall of 2018. Things got nuts with work in 2019, and now the pandemic, so it's probably going to be a while before I get a band together for a session.

Words came to me in the wee hours of Tuesday 7 April 2020. The coronavirus inspired the lyrics, obviously, but so did the undeniable rush I get every year from seeing life burst from the earth and green everything up. Without a melody in my head, I just wrote out all the words like they were coming from memory. Called it "comes to mind". When I read back over what I'd wrote, I realized it could work with the wordless tune I had from 2018 I'd called "horndog".

I recorded a sketch of the music and words together to a voice memo in my phone, and the next night I recorded the lead vocal and 4 backup vocals. The next night I performed it (just acoustic guitar and vocals) at the Skunk Hollow Tavern Open Mic on Zoom! About a week later I recorded a few vocal fixes where the timing or melody was off, and snipped out a refrain and a verse that was the same words as the current "outro", shortening it from 4 minutes down to 3 minutes.

Thanks for listening!

-Andy

together (comes to mind)

I wanna hover over the page
until the perfect phrase
comes to mind
             to take us
somewhere other than here

I wanna take you down a road
kiss you on the beach
comes to mind
             feeling fine
right here right now

    I really do hope
    no, I really know
    I'm not the only one
    I'm not alone
    I'm trying to express
    the hope in my heart
    the feeling of love
    the ache of being apart
    yet together

I wanna put you in my mind
until you feel alright
comes to mind
             to take you
somewhere other than here

I wanna take you back home
kiss you on the couch
comes to mind
             feeling fine
at home, right now

    I really do hope
    no, I really know
    I'm not the only one
    I'm not alone
    I'm trying to express
    the hope in my heart
    the feeling of love
    the ache of being apart
    yet together, united
    standing strong at home
    we're all in this together
    no one is alone!


Words by Andy Wyatt on 7 April 2020
Music by Andy Wyatt in July 2018
©2020 by The Andy Band