This is my take on the process of writing each of the eleven tracks on Vanity Fair.

VANITY FAIR–  This song is my take on the Nashville music community (which is explained in more detail on the homepage).   I actually knew I wanted to call the album Vanity Fair before I ever wrote this song, and I knew what I wanted the song to be about, but it was probably the last song I wrote before recording the album.  I let the idea sit in the back of my mind for a long time, because I didn’t want to force it.  I even started reading the novel for inspiration, but to be perfectly honest I only liked the first section of it and then I got bored and quit reading as soon as I wrote the song!

WHAT LITTLE’S LEFT OF YOU–  This is about a relationship I had with someone who was in a relationship with someone else.  We had a really special connection, but I would never want to cause a breakup, so I walked away instead.  Eventually.

NOVEMBER TRAIN–  I wrote this song as an assignment from Chris Farren (Combustion Music).  I was taking a small group workshop with him and one week he challenged us to go home and write a song for John Mayer about the fall.  I had recently been in Washington DC for a wedding and the bride and I went out on the town one night before the big day.  We visited a fortune teller just to make sure she should really get married.  I don’t remember what the fortune teller said, but that experience is where the first line came from.  Regardless of what the cards said, she got married, has a child, and now lives happily ever after.

LOVE DON’T TAKE ME DOWN–  This is my love song to love itself.  Love and I have an interesting relationship.  I’m not bitter towards love, we just don’t always get along so well.

I CAN’T MISS YOU–  This is the only song I co-wrote on the album.  It was a really personal situation that I was going through at the time, and I’m sure everyone has gone through, but I wrote it with the intention of my co-writer Kacey singing it.  She is a great country artist and I always heard this song as a country song, but my producer really fought for me to record it.  Kyle Lehning wandered into the studio during tracking and liked the song so much that he jumped in and played on it.  Then David Mead wandered in and liked the song so much that he jumped in and sang on it!

WORDS–  This song is about love, but the message in the chorus is how I try to live my life in general.  How we feel about and react to every situation we’re in, good or bad, is ultimately up to us.  I don’t think I even fully recognized and understood that concept when I wrote the song, but now that I do this song just feels closer to my heart than ever before.

TOO MANY TO MEND–  I wrote this song after watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.  It was the episode where Christina finally tells the Chief that she has been helping Burke hide his hand tremor in surgeries.  They were getting deeper and deeper into this lie and started blaming each other for taking it too far and it finally just crashed on them.  I tried to think about what I would have written if the music supervisor asked me to write a song for that scene and this just fell out of me.

BE BRAVE– I’m a little embarrassed to admit that this song is ALSO inspired by an episode of Grey’s.  I don’t remember this specific situation, but I know that it had something to do with a patient knowing they were about to die, but hanging on for days while their relative stayed bedside.  The relative finally said, stop hanging on for me, you can go now.  It was a really powerful moment for me and I wanted to capture that in a song without writing a song specifically about death.  I think the end result is very universal and relatable.

JONI MITCHELL–  There are a number of moments that all collided for this song to happen.  The first one involves my mother falling asleep at the Bluebird Cafe and embarrassing the crap out of me.  The second involves my mom and I driving around Indianapolis the day after Thanksgiving while she told me all these childhood stories about her relationship with her alcoholic father.  The third occurred days later when I found myself at the Bluebird again.  This time there were new pictures on the wall and the one that was hanging directly in front of me was of Joni Mitchell.  Joni Mitchell looks like my mom anyway, but in this picture she has her head resting in her hands with her eyes closed, just like my mom did when I caught her sleeping at the Bluebird before!  I stared at the picture the whole night, then went directly home and wrote this song.

GENEVA–  One day I sat down with my guitar–intent on writing, but with nothing to write about.  I told myself I would sit there until a song was finished no matter what.  I sat and sat looking around the room for inspiration.  One of my favorite pictures from my travels in Europe was hanging on the wall.  It is a picture of the fountain in Geneva, Switzerland with a rainbow through it.  A lot of people ask how I thought of some of the lines for this song.  To be perfectly honest I didn’t have to think at all…this is exactly how it happened.

ME WITHOUT YOU–  The first four lines of this song were literally written in my sleep.  I woke up knowing I had a good lyric and I was so scared to move, because I thought I might forget it.  Not long after, I went out to Rhode Island and visited one of my best friends from college.  We were out at his lakehouse and I played what I had for him in the hopes that he would co-write it with me.  Instead he gave me a bottle of wine and told me I had to finish it myself right then and there.  We recorded it, but I always felt the final verse was wrong.  I ended up rewriting that verse about 138 times…give or take…but it never felt right.  Over time I realized that it wanted to be a happy song, not a sad song, and I wrote the little twist in the end.  That’s when it was finally right.