Notebook : pages 41-42

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My mother-in-law lives up in Camas, WA, and the wife and I will go up to visit her every few Saturdays. She owns a piano, and I don't—all the keyboard stuff on the album was recorded in one shot at a bandmate's house, in a stolen hour or two after band practice one evening late in February—and so while we were visiting, I took the opportunity to work out in more detail the transition for the All the Girls modulation. When I'm trying to write something harmonically tricky, I'm in much better shape if I have a keyboard around to prove to me that what I've written is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I wanted a transition that would just flow—not feel like a modulation, just feel like music moving along. (In the demo for that track, I'd just feebly improvised some chord changes [and flubbed the first chord badly!] for the sake of the padding.) I dug into my fading memories of Theory II for a couple of ideas on selling a key change harmonically, and came up with the sequence sketched here and recorded with slight chordal embellishments on the album. That Gdim6 is the magic chord: a great big ball of tension that you can unwind in about four different directions.

Also, hey, finally wrote a first verse for the song! I just sang the second verse twice for the demo to fill space, but I knew I wanted this one, the idea behind it, to kick things off.