This was a product of a few factors. I wanted to create a song based on an acoustic guitar pattern I had been playing with, with fairly slow-moving harmony. The vibe of the loop was “chill,” so I wanted to keep that vibe going with the drumbeat and instrumentation. While I was writing the trumpet part, I was thinking of my younger, pre-parent days. I had some fond memories of late nights spent at the old 13 Coins location near the Seattle Times offices (I believe that the pandemic shuttered that site permanently), enjoying fries, Old Fashioneds and crème brûlées into the early morning, sometimes with an actual jazz trio performing in the lounge. It’s instrumental, because I’ve been fighting either a cold or a secondary infection from a cold for about two weeks now, so it’s tougher than usual to incorporate singing into these compositions.

The acoustic guitar loop, which is the basis for the song, is a fairly slow progression through a C Lydian chord pattern, starting with the C Lydian chord (Cmajor7#11), going to Em9, then a pattern based on Am7 with various suspensions, before a ii-V-I turnaround on D6, G major, then C major, before starting over again. Part of the trouble with a loop like this is enforcing the “home base” of C, as it’s very easy for certain harmonic or melodic moves to create a “pull” toward either G major or E minor. I tried to use the pull toward E minor for the benefit of the song, as I wanted to keep those chill / downbeat vibes. I let one very short G7 sneak into one of the turnarounds at the very end, to help tonicize the C at that point.

The acoustic guitar is a live take in my studio, using an X/Y condenser microphone pair and a Shure SM-7B to capture some of the rounder frequencies, and I built the rest of the song around that.