Day 17: High Standards (Song-a-day January)

 

Day 17: High Standards
By Chad Mathis & David Coile

Part of my daily songwriting project for January 2025

Lyrics:

Happy hour on another Tuesday
Pimpin' some tunes for a couple bucks
Cigarette haze and the smell of whiskey
It's all worth it if she's shows up

She'll be wearing
A pom pom beanine, a dirty martini
She always wears her wavy hair down
Sittin' at the bar, back to the band
Please, won't you turn around

Set break comes and I rush to find her
Tell me where did everybody go?
Got 10 minutes to the top of the hour
Bartender, here's who I'm looking for

She's wearing
A pom pom beanie, dirty martini
She always wears her wavy hair down
She sat at the bar, back to the band
Where can she be found?

He said, "she's got high standards
"Buddy, here's the score
"If you play it right
"She'll keep coming back for more"

Last call comes and the tables' clearing
Closing time, empty all your cups
Gotta get paid, gotta find the owner
Tap on the shoulder and I look up

To see
A pom pom beanie, dirty martini
She has her wavy hair down
The girl from the bar come back to the band
Before I could make a sound

She said she has "high standards
"And I've seen your band around
"Now I'll see you this weekend
"Let me write my number down."

***

Details:

Chad Mathis plays in a bunch of bands around town, but he doesn't do much songwriting. That's often the best kind of person to co-write with, because experienced players always have a song in them; they just may not know it yet.

Chad whipped us up a yummy dinner to start with, and we had a good chat before moving into his music room. I know Chad mostly as a bassist, but he's actually a multi-instrumentalist with a degree in sound production. The last couple co-writes were mostly me handling the music chores while the other person worked mostly on lyrics, but we swapped roles here, with Chad cranking out the basic song structure pretty quickly. Chad has an overarching theme that he's set for this year which has to do with movement, so the music was supposed to capture a sense of moving from one state to another.

Lyrically, we talked about some crummy gigs and how they ended up going well by the end. We started off listing fine details about setting up for a gig, but things didn't get rolling until we decided the narrator was waiting for a woman that was coming to the show.

We realized after the second chorus that we set up a scenario where the bartender must be saying something. We play acted the scene a couple times to figure out exactly what the bartender would say, then made it musical. It actually took us in a surprising direction-- we weren't planning for the girl at the bar to be the owner, but that's what is implied by the final lyric.

Anyway, this was a fun collaboration, and it was great to get to know Chad a bit better.