Track 1 – “72 Highway” – Behind the Song

I mentioned on a previous post that a new guitar led quickly to a new song. Well, that happened again with “72 Highway”. I had just finished building a 12-string guitar and was trying out different sounds with it when I somewhat accidentally switched to a heavily-distorted sound and was pleasantly surprised how it sounded. A 12-string guitar is typically best suited for clean sounds, and you’ll hear it often on folk, country, and classic rock songs that typically are clean (The rhythm guitars at the beginning of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Rush’s “Closer to the Heart”, for example).

But this heavy distortion gave it an 80s hair metal bite that instantly led to the intro guitar sound you hear on “72 Highway”. I jammed on some variations of that and gave it some structure, and then I first imagined what the lead guitar would do–an Allman Brothers’ type of approach with an overdriven slide guitar. Once that was in place, all it made me think of was a road trip–seeing the center lines of the highway passing by like they’re counting the beat of the song. That’s where the inspiration for the lyrics came from.

After I recorded this one and released it, it quickly became my son Jordan’s favorite, but I felt like the vocal performance wasn’t that great. So for the Objects in Mirror version, I re-recorded the background vocals and worked more on how the overall mix sounded. The lead vocal needed to fit into the instrumental mix better. The drums weren’t “front-and-center” enough. So I made those changes, and I liked the improvement so much that I decided to change the fade-out of the song so that only the music fades, and the last thing you hear is the harmony of the three vocal parts.