Another Dancing Song?!
Yup. I hear people like to dance to music. And this one has a different spin...
Co-writers & Inspiration
I met Katie Pappas at a video shoot not long after moving to Nashville, and we've since ended up writing together quite a bit. Last fall she called me up and asked if I wanted to join her in writing with a young singer with a powerful voice named Sierra Molinda. I agreed to give it a shot, and the three of us hit it off, so we started writing regularly. Over the past 2-3 months, we've written about an album's worth of songs for Sierra, and have been making pre-production demos in my home studio.
"Don't Buy Me a Drink" is one of my personal favorites, just because it's a little different than your standard radio country. You don't hear waltzes on the radio very much these days. In fact, most publishers and artists aren't interested in hearing waltzes because 99% of top 40 hits are in 4/4. But this song felt like it needed to be a waltz, so that's how we wrote it. Also, the message of the song, while not exactly anti-drinking, does run counter to all the drinking/party songs I've been hearing (and let's be honest... I've written a few of those, myself).
A lot of our hooks and titles for Sierra's songs come from talking to her about what's happening in her life. Katie and I parse bits and pieces of those stories into song ideas and we try to write something relevant to Sierra's point of view. One morning Sierra was telling us about being frustrated with meeting guys whose idea of romance is sitting and drinking at a bar, when she said, "Don't buy me a drink; ask me to dance!"
So the song was born. I started playing the waltzy rhythm on the guitar, we started hashing out melody and lyrics, and after a couple of writing sessions, we're pretty happy with it.
About the Recording
I put this track together in my writing room in Garageband X, with the vocal and guitar live-mic'd. The cello and drums are software instruments I played and/or programmed. I would have liked to add a dobro and maybe a mandolin, but maybe we'll save that for the real recording.
Feedback
What do you think of the song? Does it make sense to you? Need a rewrite? Any and all input is always welcome!
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