In the Key of K

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This song is from my first album from 1997 and closed out side one of the cassette tape. When I went back and listened to all the master tapes this song probably had more drafts than any other.

After many failures I rewrote the words, stopped trying to make it a blues round, and had more success. It was painful to listen to the previous attempts and I seriously considered burning the tapes. 🔥

The original vocals were horrendous, like almost everything from this era, but I re-recorded them here and, although it isn’t necessarily GOOD, it is better.

This song is about being discontent with where you are physically and metaphorically—feeling the need to move, change, and grow. Maybe loosely and subconsciously about substance abuse–which wasn’t an issue for me at this time but I was open to it. I’ve always wondered how struggling musicians could afford lots of drugs and tattoos–do they not have to pay rent or utilities?! Or buy music gear?! I never really liked drugs though I experimented. I was heavily into alcohol culture for probably ten years or so. I hate it now–I might have a drink once every few years. It just isn’t my thing anymore.

To digress, I moved from where I was staying less than a year later. Traveling and moving were recurring themes in a bunch of songs from this era. The rough drafts lyrics were also all about travelling and discontent–to paraphrase, ‘I’m stuck in the east and I would move on but I would just be stuck in the west.’ Stuff like that. All the music is from the original tapes except the vocals. There was no need to change or tweak the lyrics.

//

Moving On
Deep inside of me I feel it creeping, an urge to settle this and make me feel right.
On and on and on I’ve got to get out of here.

Don’t want to work here. Don’t want to work there. I’ld give anything to make things work out.
On and on and on I’ve got to get out of here.

Take all that I have. Give all that I take. The roots are showing, kill the feeling.
On and on and on I’ve got to get out of here.

Deep inside of me I feel it creeping, an urge to settle this and make me feel right.
On and on and on I’ve got to get out of here.

Take it all away. And they don’t save any. And now they’re starving to kill the feeling.
On and on and on I’ve got to get out of here.

Burn it down again. Build it better. And now to cause a scene and make new endings.
On and on and on I’ve got to get out of here. Ha!

//

Wanna play it? It starts with some simple tasty bass and guitar touch harmonics. The song basically has three sections.

Section one: you slide a major bar chord around the neck–minus the power chord bit on the fifth and sixth strings. This chord shape:
-7–
-7–
-8–
-9–
-x–
-x–
You slide that from the V position to VII and then V to III.
A|: B**A|G__A:|

Section two:
Originally, I played this in the first position with an open G chord. Today I would play it like this–all power chords off of the sixth string.
B5***|A5*G5*|E5***|E5*__|

Section three: this is an arpeggio of a fifth position bar chord. Add the fourth scale tone of the chord (A major). This should be enough for you to figure it out:
————————
————————
———6-6-7-6——–
——7————7—–
—-7—————–7–
-5———————–

The solo should be improvised.

What key is this? Some flavor of B or E? When I wrote this I wasn’t thinking about key signatures.

This is filler song to me now. There is nothing really fun or interesting about this song to me in 2025. I think I knew that in 1997 too. This one is interesting because it is so different sonically from a lot of the others from that era. I put way more time into this song than I did most of the others and it ends up being one of the ones I like the least. 🤷‍♂️