From the recording Beautiful Big Blue
My second release—an upbeat, electronic dance song about being on planet Earth.
In order to make this song, I bought a used banjo about two months ago and learned to play it well enough to record some basic strumming (thank you, YouTube banjo players). I had never really practiced a string instrument before.
A lot of the song's structure is built around what I could actually play with my beginner fingers on the banjo. The constraint worked, though—it forced me to keep the song simple and encouraged me to play with other elements like exploring funky ways of vocalizing the words.
When I sent the demo to the producer I work with, he sent back an incredible EDM-feeling track that kept the original country feel but added a ton of energy. When I went into his studio to record the final vocals, I noticed he'd gone out and rented a used banjo (missing a string, I might add) of his own.
This song will forever remind me of the time I first fell in love with the banjo, once the most popular instrument in the U.S. Now, I take my banjo Julia almost everywhere. I'm bringing banjo back into the mainstream!
In the end, we made something that sounds like a country song that wandered into an EDM music festival.
I love it, and I hope you do, too.
Lyrics
I
Don’t know your name
But I love you all the sameand
and I
Don’t need a thing
But a banjo and a little song to sing
I’ve got the
Sun in the southern sky
Wind in my hair and the tide rollin
In, don’t think that I
Will ever have another worry on Earth again,
in all my life
La-da-da-da, nothing I’d rather
do than ride the Earth with
You
In the beautiful big
Blue
Blue me and
You-hoo, ridin the Earth on
Through the beautiful big
Blue
Dreamin
Roller coaster screamin
Happy hours that head late into the
evening
Dancin
Second chancing
Making up songs, and loving and not under
Standing
And that
Sun in the southern sky
Wind in my hair and the tide rollin
In, don’t think that I
Will ever have another worry on Earth again,
in all my life,
La-da-da-da, nothing I’d rather
do than ride the Earth with
You
In the beautiful big
Blue
Blue, me and
You-hoo, ridin the Earth on
Through the
beau-do-do-do-do-do-hoo-tiful big
Blue
Living
Home-run hitting
Striking out, moving along, for-
Giving
Hopin
Never knowin
Never sure exactly where we’re
Going
Under that
Sun in the southern sky
Wind in my hair and the tide rollin
In, don’t think that I
Will ever have another worry on Earth again,
in all my life
La-da-da-da, nothing I’d rather
do than ride the Earth with
You
In the beautiful big
Blue
Blue, me and
You-hoo, ridin the Earth on
Through the beautiful big
Blue
credits