Week Forty: Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week “Conversations”

Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week airs EVERY WEDNESDAY at 6pm Eastern ONLY on RadioRadioX.com

This is Jesse Sample. I once heard that, “The breakdown comes right before the breakthrough,” or something like that. I don’t know who to credit it to, but it stuck. My trucks transmission literally broke down a few weeks ago. I had a songwriting collab scheduled with Roseanna Grimaldi and instead of cancelling I sent her a very needy text message while I waited for the tow truck.

I would need a ride from where I was to the studio in Mechanicville NY, and a ride home to Colonie, NY afterward, and also to borrow a guitar. And what do you know, she said she could make it happen. We bought some coffees and arrived at the studio. I channeled the uncertainty around my transportation into her American Telecaster and soon the process took over. She wrote parts and I wrote parts and then we started to watch the project change, and we responded to the change and so on and so forth. Soon, we were listening to something we liked.

But it wasn’t done. It needed something. There was point of tension in the composition that begged for something special. In songwriting, “tension” is a good thing. It is a quintessential ingredient in what makes a song work. Instability comes with a lot of potential and a heightened energy. And Rosa and I had this spot in our current composition with high tension. It was a place for a spotlight. I thought of Hip-hop artist that I’d been meaning to work with.

We called it a night and I sent   John Brown AKA Dirty Moses a text. I asked him to remind me of his email address and I fired him over a wave file. He sent me a message saying that he loved it and would record 16 bars. Boom! I did a little celebration dance, sent Rosa a text and went about my week. A couple days later, John sent a series of wave files to Rosa and me.

We reached out to bass player extraordinaire, Guthrie Lord and he laid down some mean tracks.  Rosa put on her engineer’s cap and started in on the mix. Naturally, she did some rearranging and soon the composition took on a unique shape and we all loved it.

If I cancelled our session, this series of events would have never happened in the way it did. Moments of tension and uncertainty can serve as portals into new sets of options and thought. But, like Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell, we must believe in it for it to work.