Track 3 – “The Good Old Days” – Behind the Song

This song came quickly! From the first idea (the acoustic guitar in the intro) to the first demo recording (no lyrics) took just 4 hours. As I listened to that demo, the music just screamed nostalgia. I started thinking of it like a letter to myself from the future, where I tell myself to soak up the moments I have with my family. The verses then flowed right out–I could barely keep up. The chorus took a couple of days to iron out, but once I made a couple of adjustments to the music it all came together.

Typically, I will sit with a song for weeks, listening over and over and trying different approaches to tweak it. But this one was written June 8, 2024 (that first instrumental demo), the writing finished by June 12, and I recorded it in full on June 15. I didn’t want to rush it, so I listened to it every day for 2 1/2 weeks before sending it off to streaming platforms, where it debuted July 7–just 29 days from inception to release.

For the Objects in Mirror version, I added a second acoustic guitar to mirror what the original played, and I re-recorded the vocal. As I was listening back to the new guitar part (which was recorded at home with a microphone), I heard a quite obvious ambient noise in the second verse–my son Jordan laughing in the hallway. At first I thought I needed to record it again, but it seemed too real to be singing about “my kids were that small” and “my goodness, the noise” just when his joyful noise pops into the recording background.

At that point I decided to be intentional about it. I went back through some videos of my boys being small and making noise, and I found one that went perfectly with the beginning of the song.

And that’s just the story with this one. We try so hard as parents to get things perfect, and sometimes you can feel like your kids acting like kids can get in the way of that–ruining pictures, stressing you out in public, etc. But later on, you’re not going to look back on “how perfect that went” or “how perfect we looked in that family photo.” You’re going to laugh as you reminisce about all the experiences only your kids could have given you. Those perfectly imperfect times you wouldn’t trade for anything. They were the good old days.