A lot about this song can be attributed to our drummer, Jeff Ernst. Humming a little melody out to the rest of the band, Gary Ingle adapted his idea into the keyboard motif you hear played on the intro. Copious amounts of jamming ensued, resulting in other parts getting developed & added. It was truly built from the ground up, together, as a band. Hearing that riff on the keys, along with the drumbeat, immediately made me think of bands like the Meters and Funkadelic, along with guitar players such as John Scofield, Robben Ford, and Jim Weider.
Another aspect of the song that is directly related to drummer Jeff is the title. Most musicians tend to have some sort of ‘vocal shorthand’ as a way to verbalize their riff or licks, in order to get ideas across to others. Jeff has lots of hilarious onomatopoeias he uses in order to express his drum patterns, “chickablekkeh” being one such example. This is the word used to ‘pronounce’ his intro lick, which can be found at other intervals throughout the song. To truly bring honor to the phrase, we recorded our first gang vocals for this song!
We also want to give props to both keyboardists who have “honorary member” status in the band (promotion to “full-time” is always open to either
☺).
John Deaderick laid down some awesome organ for us on this song, to
which we are truly thankful for his time and talent. He appears on one
other song on the EP as well. Gary Ingle helped with writing and
arranging the songs on this project in it’s early stages, but had to
step back when other commitments took priority. His contributions can be
heard on other songs in this project.So there’s the first taste; hope you enjoy & thanks so much for listening (all the way to the end, we hope
☺).
The other five songs on the EP run through a gamut of styles; truly no
song sounds like another. We think this collection of songs touches on
several genres we love, while still maintaining a uniformity of sound.
Anyway, categories are for suckers, right?! Can’t wait for you to hear
the rest!