The year 1996 was one of my most prolific, in terms of both songwriting and general creativity. The band I had co-founded the year before would soon add a drummer and move from a sparsely albeit inventively instrumentalized trio into a full-fledged rock ensemble. Desperate to have more songs on which I would sing, and thus not have to play any instruments, I spent the summer of ’96 in a songwriting tizzy.
My general style at the time was to think of a cool title first, and then come up with lyrics and a melody later. The lyrics would usually be strings of non sequiturs linked together only by an imagined relationship to the title of the song. The melody would often come out naturally as I was writing the words down. I was able to write many songs this way. I only had trouble finishing songs when I tried to make them about an actual subject.
(Nowadays when I write songs, which is rare, I usually think of a melody or riff first, then try to write words around it, and then spend a long time thinking about what it should be called. This is probably a more normal method of songwriting.)
I wrote Mr. Claim-the-Credit that summer. I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of WHIO-TV, where I had an internship. I had just returned from my lunch break, but still had some time left, and I didn’t want to go back inside until I absolutely had to. It was that kind of internship. And as I sat there in my turned-off car in the summer heat, the song appeared fully-formed in my head.
Sometime after that, I recorded this demo. My brother Tim is on bass, trumpet, and baritone; Chuck Hague on guitar; Brian McKinney on drums. The arrangement you hear is their collective interpretation of my melody.
Ultimately, my band decided not to add it to our playlist. I seem to remember an outright rejection of any song whose title started with “Mister”. Unwilling to compromise my title (and thus my artistic principles also), I let it go.
Mr. Claim-the-Credit [MP3, 3.8MB]
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