Week no. 2 Sketch no. 1: "My Own Teeth"

Don't tell my newspaper colleagues, but only one entry into my project of releasing a new song every other week, I've already blown my deadline. So, let me introduce a new series of sketches of unfinished music.

Here I am with hat in hand. A song every other week used to be laughably easy for me. I mean, I used to make a record a week. Granted, they were uniformly awful, but still it's fascinating how much slower the whole process is for me.

With that said, I don't present to you a completed song. This is a sketch of "My Own Teeth," which began as an acoustic guitar ditty. The lyric conceit is from a Fela Kuti song ("Only a fool eats his own teeth"), which made me think about a fool and then a cuckold. Musically, I wanted to sound like the Beatles, but the prolonged Fmaj9 vamp as an intro pushed it in a different direction with the almost classical piano melody leading into big Who-style suspended chords, a verse out of Motown and a pre-chorus stolen from the Band. So where's the song going? Who knows!

What the sketch doesn't have is any live instrumentation overdubs, and I didn't really mix it at all. This is as is. Enjoy.