Just before the end of 2018, I started to research lyric videos and began learning a bit about imovies on my computer. Throughout january I searched my destroyed hardrive for video clips (damn, I lost so much good stuff) and found enough clips of our kids and videos with chuck to through together, what i consider) a good representation for our band and the song.
Ode From The Road was inspired by missing family as we toured and also Owen, Mara, and I missing michele as she traveled extensively for work. In fact, the kid you hear singing a tune at the beginning is Owen, who wrote a song about missing mommy when she flies to “Canyafornia”. If you look at the title of the song there is another nod to my son, Owen Dean Esper. His initials are ODE. And yes, we were nerdy enough to plan his initials to form a music and writing related word.
My parents only had MTV for a short time before I moved out and by then music videos only got played here and there between reality tv shows, so I didn’t grow up with them (though I heard about Faith No More for the first time via their Epic video). I don’t know a lot about music videos, but I knew enough to understand we didn’t have a budget or enough found footage to make something to compare with mainstream bands. I also guessed that if our band tried to show skin like Madonna, we would only manage to scare more people away.
Luckily, the song’s subject matter and tone fit us adding in clips of our kids and each other as they are who the song was about. While I put the final touches of the clip, our guitarist Donald Spak and his wife had their first child. Perhaps, down the road, I can do a remix of the video and include footage of their family. He brought the original guitar riff and demo to the table, so it only seems fitting.
When I first heard the song, I enjoyed the vibe, but Indoria has always favored short songs so it took me several more listens to attempt patterns and lyrics. Man, typing that out makes me sound truly lazy…which, I am.
As it usually happens, Adam and I got together to work on filling out the song. I recorded several scratch tracks of vocals as I trimmed and edited the lyrics. Chuck and Michele then came over and brought the lyrics and melody to life. Chuck spent several hours working on a few dozen ideas for the end of the song, building and layering one track over another. He took a simple idea and made it better and better and better, though before we had all the separate tracks playing together, Adam and I had no idea where he was going with his backing tracks. Chuck did this a lot. He heard layers of sounds and knew how to take all these random lines of notes and get them to gel.
Adam had his work cut out for himself now, with all of these tracks he needed to make sense of. He paired things down to a manageable mix. Ode From The Road was one of the first couple of songs completed for what was then a new Chuck acoustic project, but before long we realized it made more sense to release it as an Indoria EP.
We never got to play the song live with Chuck, but may play it live in his honor someday. I can’t promise to do Chuck’s voice justice, but…well, no promises, okay?