GrooveLily

One of the first songs I wrote for GrooveLily is “Tell Me What’s On Your Mind.” It’s very sweet, very straightforward, and (in my humble opinion) memorable — so much so that we actually recorded it three times over the course of four years in an effort to get it on the radio. (To wit: 1996, 1997, and 2000) A little bit of trivia: the version on Little Light has the distinction of being the only track on that album that we in the band play almost no instruments on: Val sings, I play nothing, and Gene plays a quarter scraped across a single ride cymbal.

Val, Brendan and Max in Weesp, The Netherlands, in July of 1995

The song was written in the summer of 1995, when Val, Max Langert and I were in Amsterdam for 13 weeks. We had a meeting with a representative of EMI Music Publishing in Weesp, a town a few train stations away. The guy from EMI was looking for songs for Dutch artists to record, and was hoping for a hit.

On our way out of the office, I started to hear this simple song in my head, and started jotting down some ideas at a cafe on a canal around the corner. By the time we got back to the upstairs room at Boom Chicago where a grand piano was just sitting there in an empty room, all it took was twenty minutes at the keyboard and I had it.

Somewhere around here, there’s a DAT tape of me, Val, Max Langert on drums and Ken Schaefle on bass, recording the song live and direct to 2-track from the stage of Boom Chicago. If I recall correctly, it sounds wildly different from any of the versions that are on record — more obvious, blatant and hamfisted rock, but still the same sweet song underneath the arrangement. (Anybody in the LA area got a DAT machine they can lend me? Mine seems to have gotten lost in one of the last two moves we’ve done…)

The guy from EMI didn’t dig it — or the song Val had written in the same time frame, “Tell It Like It Is.” He chose to, as they say in the industry, “pass” on our mediocre-sounding DAT tape of songs.

In the years to come, “Tell Me What’s On Your Mind,” specifically the Little Light album version, was used regularly as background music on soap operas (thanks to a licensing deal we struck with Heavy Hitters). I don’t have the exact data handy, but I think it’s second only to “Home,” which has been successful beyond Val’s wildest dreams of soap-opera-background-music-stardom.

In 2008, we were approached by our buddy Sean Flahaven about a new music publishing deal with Warner/Chappell. Sean represents WC’s Theatre and Standard Repertoire department, but he also pitches songs from musical theater shows to rock, pop and r&b artists.

One of the major stumbling blocks to us being able to actually sign with Warner/Chappell was that we had signed away publishing rights to six songs with Heavy Hitters, and “Tell Me What’s On Your Mind” was one of them. Warner/Chappell wants exclusive publishing rights to the songs of people it signs, and our deal with Heavy Hitters was the same. There was, dare I say it, a bit of a tug of war over these six songs, and specifically over this one tune.

Eventually both sides relented and agreed to share in the publishing of these six songs, and we were able to ink a deal with Warner/Chappell. Sean asked if we could do a remix of “Tell Me What’s On Your Mind” in an r&b style, so that he might be better able to pitch the song to a particular female r&b artist.

Val and I agreed that I would sing it–that I would whip out my white-boy mad hip-hop/r&b skillz and attempt to do it justice, while still placing the song in the context of something this unnamed-yet-very-specific female r&b singer might want to perform.

So I made a brand-new recording of the song. Let’s face it: I am not black, I have a thin voice, and I’m not an r&b producer. But this was very, very fun to do:

Listen to the song

Buy the song

The demo hasn’t led to any bites from major stars yet, but listening to it makes me happy. (If you like listening to it, do us a favor and buy it for a dollar–the money goes straight to pay for band expenses. Thanks)

It’s really nice that I finally get to sing this song for this reason: in the summer of 1995, Val and I had been dating for a little under a year, and we were just hitting our first bumpy spots in our relationship. We hadn’t yet learned how to really open up to each other about what we were feeling, and what the other person was doing that really pissed us off. Or, to be more specific, what *I* was doing that really pissed *her* off. And this little song was my way of gently prodding her to open up to me, to tell me what was on her mind. Letting her know that I wouldn’t break if she got angry at me.

Val and I have now been in one wild, long committed relationship for fifteen years now. The only other person I’ve spent anywhere near this much time with is Gene Lewin, and he doesn’t have ANY trouble telling me what’s on HIS mind.