Today Is A New Day

johnnolanmusic:

Sympathy For The Martyr

This has always been one of my favorite Straylight Run songs. It involved a lot of collaboration from everyone in the band. It’s one of those songs where the end result was better than anything any of us could have done individually. It started with a bassline that Shaun had been messing around with for awhile. We all played around with that together to come up with the intro and verses. Shaun also put together the chord progression for the chorus. I really like the changes, especially the A major to A minor change. The rest of the song just kind of evolved as all of us played with different ideas at practice. Somewhere along the way we decided to keep the ending going and have some fun with it. Michelle made up the “Ba Ba Da Da Da” part as we were playing around with different ideas for the ending. We all really liked that part, so when I started writing the rest of the lyrics and melodies I sort of worked backwards from that.
People have asked me who this song is about, and it would make for a great story if the lyrics were a direct message to one particular person, but sadly the reality is a lot less interesting. The words weren’t really aimed at a particular person, but more of an amalgam of different people I’d come across in my life. After singing the lyrics many times I started to realize that if I was honest I was singing to myself as well, or at least some part of myself.
I really like the production on this song.  It was one of the only times on our first album that we really spent a lot of time experimenting in the studio. We worked with Mike Birnbaum and Chris Bittner on that album and they did some cool things with the recording and mixing on this one. One thing in particular that I remember is that we had wanted to have real horns playing over the ending. It was either too expensive, or there wasn’t enough time to make it happen so they had the idea to use a mellotron, which is an old keyboard where each key triggers a tape loop of actual strings or horns playing that note. It has a really unique sound and I love the way it worked with the ending of this song.