On July 3rd, I released the four-track EP, “No Heaven.” It featured the two released singles, “No Heaven” and “Outside,” as well as two new songs. “Distraction” is the first of those.

Distraction is a song written to yell at the world for being stupid. The smooth and groovy nature somewhat belies the fact that it is me telling everyone to smarten up, or else. At the time I wrote it, I think I was thinking of the meme coin fad and how people were “investing” money in very obvious nonsense. Very often, the scam was known to everyone ahead of time and they just participated like a carnival game; trying not to lose their money before everyone else does. The idea, though, applies to many different aspects of life in recent years. There are so many obvious scams committed by obvious fraudsters, but, yet, there are gleeful takers to be had.

Lyrics

The verses reference emotions that I believe people use to control people and make them scared, apathetic, hateful, and angry. All useful tools to make people malleable. The pre-chorus and chorus describe the manipulation. Also, by using “bullshit” and “shitty,” I made my first song with an explicit label.

In the bridge, there is a more echoey set of lyrics, but on a similar theme. “Look at the stupid monkey and watch him do tricks!” The monkey on a string lyric was inspired by the Dave Matthews Band song, “What Would You Say?” “…If you a monkey on a string // Don’t cut my lifeline…”

Music

The song is written in D minor and is almost a funk, really. In the intro/verse/chorus there is an up/down strumming of D minor on the first beat, which is definitely a funky thing to do. The lead guitar is doing several repeated licks in, mostly, a D minor pentatonic. My favorite part of the entire song is the D minor to F minor move in both the intro and the verse. F minor is not in D minor and the discordance is part of what gives the song a bit of jazz character. I hope that I make a couple of jazz cats smile by doing that. Actually, the only other chords to be found are in the chorus, which has a nice G minor 7th to A minor 7th to accompany, “…[Gmin7]be manipulated when // [Amin7] these cages were…”

Other aspects of the song give it a jazz character. The verse and chorus are written as a call and response between the lead guitar and an accompanying bass, which is doing an accompanying part in a D minor pentatonic. Combined with the drums (particularly the snare) I hope that the song has a flavor of a jazz trio that is well and truly in the pocket.

With the bridge, I wanted to do something different. Up to that point, the whole song sounds like this fairly tight, jazz ensemble. When the second chorus hit “lose control,” I wanted to break that jazz character and make the music lose control. The bass switches to doing a fast, repeated riff. The guitars begin to do alternate stabs on the beat, while the lead plays a solo in the background. In fact, in the DAW, I am actively having the different rhythm guitars pan in different directions with different reverb effects, to create the sense that order has broken down. Hopefully, the effect is to have a psychedelic break in the middle of an, otherwise, jazzy song.