Too much love?

I need to draw the cover art again. The last one wasn't good enough, and when I tried to improve it, I made it worse. So it goes. Back to song blog for now.

Sometimes, songwriting grinds to a halt. When that happens, I look for ways to get it going. It might mean working with a different instrument — piano, for instance, instead of guitar — or starting with really basic chords. "The Easy Way" came out of doing the latter. Just one, four, and five until the one variation at the end of verses two and three.

I made up the story in the song. I think I wrote the lyrics pretty much in the order they are now, although I rewrote the third verse a few times.

I had not planned originally to include this song on Shake the World, but it started to feel like it belonged. "No one ever says there's too much love" is one of my themes for last year, I think. Just when we need more love, and action driven by love, an alarming number of people are on the anti-love side (usually while professing the opposite). And even though I wrote this song a few years ago, it feels even more true that we were foolish to think we could take the easy way.

I had doubled both acoustic and electric guitars, but the song started to feel too sweet, lacking edge, so I simplified the mix. The guitar solo is pretty conventional, but it's some of my better playing. The one guitar under the voice in the third verse is played with the capo way up high on the seventh fret. I love using a capo. It doesn't just let you change the key of a song. It lets you change how the guitar itself sounds.