An arena rock song about wanderlust and craving open spaces.

I found the acoustic guitar part and main vocal line of this song on a one-minute voice memo I left myself in March of 2018. I'm pretty sure it was improvised and I have no idea why I wrote it. A line about "cotton fields" in the second verse along with it being written at the tail end of winter makes me think it was about travel, as my last trip would have been to visit my wife's relatives in the Mississippi delta for Christmas, and I'm sure I was missing it after a claustrophobic Chicago winter.

Little did I know how much more resonance that would have now after being shut up for nearly a year in a two bedroom condo (I have it better than many). So I expanded the instrumentation so that the track flows from a simple beginning into a huge wall of complex sound that is both comforting and restless. I also included dreamlike elements in the reverb of the vocals, a vocoder undertrack, and synthesized sounds in addition to the more standard acoustic and electric instruments. 

The result is a track I recommend listening to in a space where it can grow to fill the whole room and be played loud without blowing out your ears. Influences include Led Zeppelin, the Fleet Foxes, The Eagles, and Radiohead.

Music, words, production, and performance all by Jeremy Cohn. Copyright 2021, All Rights Reserved

Beside Me

Jeremy Cohn