Honey Text Me Back

Originally released on Songs on the Eve of Dismissal (2017) – sheet music & play along tracks

A friend, worried, texting into silence. The ballad slows to a walking pace, Thomsen’s bass clarinet standing in for the friend’s voice, low and commiserating, alto sax joining like a second person leaning in to help carry the weight. The one moment on the record where someone else notices before she says a word.

Honey Text Me Back was the first track I wrote for this project, and by a wide margin the fastest. Bastiaan sent over the lyrics, and the whole thing, arrangement included, was finished in one afternoon. Mozart tempo, I like to call it, mostly because it makes the rest of the process sound worse than it was by comparison. The other eight songs took considerably longer, as if all the luck had gone into that first afternoon, and the rest had to be written the normal way.

The song itself starts out sounding like a wartime love letter and gradually reveals itself to be about mortgages, GDP, and a fairly gentle warning against office cocaine habits, which is either a strange evolution or exactly the kind of one Bastiaan and I were aiming for.

You’ll hear an excellent alto saxophone solo from Floris van der Vlugt here, along with some fine bass clarinet lines from Tini Thomsen. This arrangement differs from the original recording too: the drum part, which leaned heavily on the afterbeat, has been replaced by two tambourines playing four equal beats in sync with the bass, and the original guitar part swapped for an electronic sample version. The lead sheet comes with play-along tracks for every instrument in the arrangement, so you’re welcome to join in on your own instrument while Linda does all the worrying for you.