GUY STEVOS - Morning in the City
Those of you who attended the last two FUN! shows would have heard this tune live. I based the parts on an acid jam I'd had with Trevor in January, which I basically transcribed from memory. The lyrics came a couple of weeks later, after a particularly moody and confusing day. Teaching it to the band took 15 minutes and it was all of a sudden a real tune. After our final gig, I recorded it at home in two hours and passed it on to Jason at Synaptic Plastic to master it, hence all the nice reverb.
But I have to admit, this song was inspired lyrically by a hip-hop group called Heavyweight. I'd sat in on a couple of studio sessions with them, and they'd had this one sorta gloomy, jazzy tune about taking the train to work everyday that put in me in a certain mood everyday. I suppose the chord progression must have had that same atmosphere to it, so as soon as I started to put the aforementioned jam into a song, I was back in that same mood. You know what I mean, that lethargic, dredging feeling you get sometimes on a dolorous day. It snows in the morning and rains at night, life is riding on a slow current day in day out, and you can feel the wave of desire moutning within you, assuring you that there must be something more to life than cycling through your day.
I needed some kind of hook, and I remembered the MC jokingly rhyming "up up down down" to the beat. Everyone laughed and didn't take him seriously at the time, but I must have stored it away in some special place, because as I wrote the hook, the "up - down - together" bit came naturally.
So yeah, props to that session with Trevor, the inspiration from Heavyweight, and the two live performances with FUN!
