About the Song — “Incident”

In 2008, right after I released my first solo album Songs from Memory, I wrote a song called “Incident.”

I liked this tune quite a bit. It was based on a story from a friend of mine describing his experience with Match.com. It seems that one of the ways to improve your options on the site is to increase your radius. That is, instead of looking for matches within five miles of your place, you look for matches within ten miles, 20 miles, 50 miles. I immediately created this fictional scenario in my head of some guy, a little too anxious for a match, increasing his radius to include out-of-state, even out-of-the-country people. The story has a happy ending. If you’ve never heard the song, we released a live-ish version of it I’m very proud of.

When I stopped playing music in 2009 to focus on writing, my biggest disappointment was knowing that I’d left “Incident” unrecorded. Such songs tend to stick with me, the ones I don’t get around to recording and are left only in my head, bugging me to take them the rest of the way. My producer and longtime cohort Bret Hartley felt the same. As the years passed, Bret reminded me here and there of the song’s potential and how he’d like to get it down someday.

The opportunity arose in 2013 when I needed to record another song, “Calypso,” to serve as the single for my third novel Badge. If Bret was going to get Kevin Leahy and his drum kit micced up for “Calypso,” they could knock out “Incident” as well, right? So, we had Kevin lay drums for those two tracks, as well as for a third, “Jesus Camp,” which I must’ve thought was necessary at the time but can’t remember why now.

Along with “Calypso,” Bret and I finished “Incident” and “Jesus Camp,” thinking the time might come at some point to include them on an album. I had a friend in Portland named Dave Lindenbaum who had a home studio, and Dave’s place worked well for knocking out bass and lead vocals for the tracks. Bret did his magic in his home studio, and in 2020, he added that cool backing vocal part to the chorus— one of the last additions to the album.

So, the version of “Incident” you hear on Loving Every Other Minute of It was written in 2008, partially recorded in 2013, and finished in 2020. Twelve years is probably too long for a song to come to fruition, but then again, I can’t argue with the results. To hear the final version of “Incident,” pick up your vinyl or CD copy of Loving Every Other Minute of It. The album’s also available as an mp3 download at bandcamp. These sales are how I support my musical life, so do consider taking the plunge.

Laying down the law,

Art

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