A few weeks ago I was standing at the stove making my son’s eggs. I’d already fixed my wife’s breakfast and she was sitting there eating it, doing something on her phone, not paying any attention to me.
I stopped cooking and just watched her.
My son looked over. “Dad, what are you grinning at?”
“Your mama, boy.”
That happens at my house. It’s not a special occasion. I’ve been married twenty-seven years and she is still, to me, the most interesting thing in any room she’s in, and every so often I lose track of what I was doing.
The song came out of that morning, though not directly.
What actually started it was a sliding riff I’d been messing with on the guitar — nothing planned, just something I liked the sound of and kept playing. Somewhere in the middle of it I said two words out loud.
Falling more.
And the rest of it showed up. Not all at once, but fast, because I finally had the thing everything else could hang on.
I keep falling more
Like there’s no floor to this thing
There’s never been a floor
I still watch her like a sunset, scared to even blink
I haven’t found the bottom yet
Falling more
Here’s the part I’ve come to love about writing songs.
The chorus is your thesis, and you get to sing it. One idea, stated plainly, repeated until the repetition itself starts making the argument. Then the verses are your evidence — the specific things that prove the claim you keep making.
I keep falling more. That’s the claim. And the first piece of evidence is a man who forgot he was cooking eggs.
Once you notice the structure you can’t stop seeing it. “Hotel California” gives you the whole mood in the chorus and then walks you through the story underneath. “The Thunder Rolls” — the chorus is the storm, the verses are what’s happening while it breaks. You’re not decorating a hook. You’re arguing a case, and you happen to be singing it.
Which is why the hard part is never the chorus. The hard part is finding the idea, and the idea is almost always just a phrase you stumble into while doing something else.
Redemption keeps showing up in everything I write, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a coincidence. I live a redeemed life. God saved me from myself, and once you’ve been on the receiving end of that, you start recognizing the shape of it in other places.
Marriage is one of those places. Two people who are not finished, staying, and covering for each other’s worst material long enough that both of them come out better than they went in. Twenty-seven years of somebody choosing to keep doing that for me.
So the love song isn’t only a love song. I don’t set out to write about grace. It just turns out to be underneath the thing I was writing about anyway.
Songwriting also makes me find out what I think.
You’re either writing from your own view or you’re inside somebody else’s, and the second one has a habit of changing your mind. I’ve walked into a song feeling one way about a situation and walked out of it feeling differently, because I had to sit inside a perspective long enough to make it sing. That’s not a technique. It’s just what happens when you have to say a thing well enough to repeat it.
Mostly I do it because I like it. I’ve spent this year making things, and this is the one that reminds me I’m not only the guy who writes about frameworks.
She’s heard it. She loved it.
She still doesn’t notice when I’m watching her, though — not that morning, not most mornings. The recording is finished, verses and bridge and all. The case it makes keeps building anyway, in the kitchen, while the eggs go cold.
David Willis 