Wake UP

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Notes by the Author:

I dress poorly. Very poorly. Part of the reason stems from a general slovenliness, but part of the reason has to do with a radical rejection of the notion that people should be judged on how they look or dress. This song is about the way that people can often drive themselves crazy trying to keep up with the latest fashion or trying to look cool; these are false promises of happiness that seldom get anyone anywhere. Of course, most of us came to this conclusion the second year of high school. At least those of us who weren’t going to the homecoming dances kept telling ourselves this.

The first person we tried to get to become our manager was a very nice person named Kirsten Walker, who is now a high powered business consultant. At the time we met her she was a graduate student in the master’s program at Baylor. Kirsten accidentally listened to our tape and one day in class when I looked particularly in need of coffee said: "Wake up, wake up, wake up!" I decided that I really liked having my own lyrics repeated back to me.

Interlude: My fourth favorite movie ever (behind the Exorcist, Beauty and the Beast, and Real Genius) is That Thing You Do. There is a scene in the movie that makes all musicians froth, and it is a scene that depicts the band playing a bunch of covers that nobody cares about. The band then heroically kicks into their own original song, and the audience rushes the stage and goes crazy. Of course, that never happens in real life. Most of the time everyone wants to hear the covers and goes to sleep when you play original music.

Anyway, another grad student named Jeff English (who we would also later try to browbeat into acting as our manager), hosted a party. Bill and I were playing to a lukewarm crowd of 30 that was being respectfully polite but mostly couldn’t figure out if we were serious or not. Anyway, just as we were moving toward our last song, Bill and I started playing "Wake Up." Kirsten and 4 friends flew into a frenzy, rushed at us, and started singing along. Nobody else knew what was up but all the commotion made everyone come toward the stage and start dancing along. It was just like the scene from That Thing You Do. It is a period I now describe as "the best 10 minutes of my life." I was so pumped up that when we were done playing I went back to my favorite coffee shop and asked a gorgeous 18 year old to go look at stars with me; the subsequent evening would inspire "Daughter of the Moon" (see above).

Notes by the Other Guy:

This was the first of Jon’s songs that I realized had serious performance potential. I didn’t recognize that right away, because for a while we were still playing with the arrangement. In its slower incarnation, the song didn’t move me. I don’t remember how we decided to speed it up, but I’ll cheerily take credit for endorsing, if not suggesting, the idea when it came up.

When Jon first played me a demo tape of this song, there was already a guitar on it. He told me that some other friend of his (Charles Blanchard?) had provided that, and it was what he was looking for. (You should know that this was very early in my electric guitar career. Until I met Jon, I’d never owned an electric guitar. He blithely ignored that, insisting that since I could pick up an electric guitar, and knew what the strings meant, I could play that as well as he could play keyboards. I’m pretty sure by now that you’ll agree.) But I was mildly jealous of the fact that Jon would call in another session player for one of his songs, and doubly jealous that this guy knew how to handle an electric guitar. So I wondered what I was there for.

So as we developed this song, in the back of my mind was always an ambition to add something to the arrangement, and the little arpeggios and the tempo are part of my contribution. (Of course, I have no idea what the other guy would have done if he’d been given the chance. But we can’t obsess over that, can we?) In the end, I loved playing this song, especially live.