A Better Man
ORIGIN STORY
I started writing this song after a few months of dating someone. She was beautiful and kind and I was falling in love with her. I wrote the verses and chorus and I played it for her. She loved it.
All of these voice memos were recorded in one night. You can hear the quick progression as the song revealed itself. This is one of the greatest feelings as a songwriter.
I love this song for that reason. It came so quickly and cleanly… I felt it pulling me along.
A few weeks later I recorded a demo with programed drums and instruments. I sent it to her and she played it for friends and requested that I sing it for her at the piano when we were together.
What I didn’t tell her is that I knew it was a break-up song.
The song told the truth before I was ready to.
You might recognize this vocal. I decided to keep it and build the real recording around it. I tried to sing it again, but couldn’t do as honestly as I had done it when I first wrote it. It’s a great lesson about songs. They should be recorded closer to the time they were born… otherwise something gets lost.
But the song never felt finished until we had officially broken up. That’s when I sat at the same piano where it had all started a year earlier and wrote the bridge. I knew I had lost her. I knew she would fall in love again soon. I imagined it would probably be with a better man.
