• With story songs, you’ve got to think of it all making sense, start to finish, and have a twist at the end, almost like a punch line.
  • Sometimes you’ve got to be more obvious than you’re artistically comfortable being. You already know the story, but the message has to shine through at a bar at 1 a.m. when everybody’s hammered, the band is too loud and the P.A. sucks.
  • When a song isn’t working, leave it alone. Go do something else, or keep the instrument in your hands, keep singing, but work on vocal or guitar exercises or learn cover songs. Sometimes things will slip in and come to you that way.
  • Choose chord voicings according to the mood, style and instrumentation of a song. When I’m playing alone, acoustically, I’ll play different voicings. In our four-piece setting, sometimes what I’m doing is more textural, so if there’s a key riff, voicing or feel, Grant will take it over on electric so it speaks out.