I recently had an excellent lesson in perspective . . .

Several months ago our drummer Owen brought in a song he had written, and asked me to take a listen to see if we might want to play it.  It was a great song idea, but there was something about it that just didn’t sit right with me.  Another month passed, he made some changes to the song, and asked if I could take another listen since he had a really strong feeling about it.  I listened, and alas, it again just didn’t sit right with me.  (at this point I’m just feeling awful about it too) Then I realized the problem!! The chords of the song were pretty much the exact same chord progression as two of my MOST HATED pop-rock songs of the last ten years.  I tried to move past it, but all I could hear were those songs.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later when Donn laid down some guitar tracks for said song that I could actually start to hear the song differently.  I went home, played around with the chords, and was struck with a jaw-dropping moment of “holy shit” realization:

The chords to a pair of my MOST HATED songs were the EXACT same chords as ONE OF MY FAVORITE SONGS OF ALL TIME!!!

WTF?  Like a super-hero who finds out that his evil archenemy is actually his long lost twin brother, I was equally freaked out and excited.  So yeah, we jammed the song last night at rehearsal, and it was great.  All it took was a little different perspective (from Donn’s guitar part) to make me see a song in a totally different light.  I thought it was a rather elegant reminder that there are two sides to every coin, and sometimes there is a fine line between love and hate.

We’d love to hear your stories about perspective too . . .

Cheers,
- Michael -