“In the Right” was the first song I wrote after a years-long — possibly decades-long — hiatus.
Back in July 2022, Harold (the original singer in my old band, The Reign) sent me a text asking if I had any songs that he, his son, and Doug (The Reign’s drummer) could use in a band they were forming.
I did not, in fact, have any songs, but one started to take shape on my morning walks.
I don’t often write songs while walking; I don’t want every song to have the same tempo. But I had let my walking habit lapse, and I needed something to keep my pace up. “In the Right” worked well for that.
It started with an imagined drum beat, and then a guitar riff. The first line of the lyric showed up quickly after that, and then the second — though, in the first iteration, the roles were swapped: she was in the right, and he was in the wrong.
I wandered through a winding trail of false starts, mumbled fragments, emergent rhymes — limping toward something like a story, but not quite feeling it.
Things clicked when I switched the roles in the song, when I made him right and her wrong.
I don’t like to write about my life, per se (though I used to), but I do appreciate resonances. And that switch brought back — emotionally, and rather unpleasantly — an experience I’d had.
I’d been arguing with my at-the-time significant other, and we’d reached the point where the argument was over. Yet for some reason, I had to have the last word, and so reiterated my position yet again.
I don’t remember much; I have no idea what we were arguing about, for example, and I suspect she doesn’t remember it at all. But I do remember, still, her withering look of frustration and disappointment.
“In the Right” isn’t about that experience, but it’s definitely informed by it.
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