Chad and I wrote this song about 6 years ago when we were in this phase where we were playing nothing but open mics and coffee houses.  

We were telling ourselves, at the time, that we were building our fanbase through a grassroots movement, but what we really meant by that was that we didn't have a drummer, bassist, or keyboardist who would/could play with us on a consistent basis.  

Anyway, we played just about every freakin' open mic in town and some were good and some were absolutely awful.  One, in particular, turned into our white whale....Uncommon Ground.  On Monday nights, they had this open mic contest where a handful of musicians would play for a small, stuffy, tightly packed back room and they had turned it into a kind of contest so that the person who got the most applause won a bucket of donated money.  It never really amounted to much, but it was sort of bragging rights to win and you were held in high regard the following week....which really meant absolutely nothing.  

So, anyway, Chad and I decided we HAD to win this thing and we threw everything we had at them.  Each week we went back, trying to win that stupid open mic, using whatever song we thought was the absolute best we had to offer at the time.  After a bit, we realized that people were really looking less for good songwriting and more for the "image" of a true coffeehouse artist.  This one guy who kept winning annoyed the hell out of us.  Don't even remember his name, but I remember he was really skinny, had really fwoopy (it's a word) hair and wore a large, casually-wrapped scarf year-round...seriously, no matter how hot it was, he had that damned scarf on as if his precious vocal chords were made of the most precious crystal and needed to be protected at all costs.  

Anyway, the crowd ate him up.  He'd start each song be recounting how "I wrote this song while crashing on the floor of a small hut in a village in rural Laos.  I was taken in by an old farmer who took pity on me and showed me how to swim with the dolphins in the bay..." or some absolutely ridiculous set-up.  After losing to this guy for the third straight time, we got frustrated and wrote this song basically railing against people who take their art too seriously and pretend not to.  

We brought this absolute masterpiece of self-aware irony back to Uncommon Ground the following Monday........and promptly lost to a bald girl who forgot to bring her guitar and simply warbled a capela for ten minutes.  Go figure.

Dissolute

Bryan Pray