What do you mean “Get Shirky”?

Excellent question.

I’ve always had a lot of music lying around that didn’t seem like it belonged with everything else. Kinda like what Garth Brooks did with Chris Gaines, except without the enormous public persona to torch almost beyond all recognition.

A couple years back as I began to acquiesce to making more and more music on a laptop as opposed to an electric guitar, I started to put down ideas for things that were driven more by bass, more by rhythm, less by some need to stumble upon a lyric equal parts cryptic and revealing. I thought less about how something might be received and a lot more about what might put a smile on my face.

I was thinking, of course, about Shirky.

The name is everything and nothing. Originally an oblique reference to an NYU professor whose book Here Comes Everybody I loved, it came to mean over time shrugging off expectations and baggage and ideas about what the songs I was writing were supposed to be. The subtle art of not giving a fuck if you will.

The song was originally much longer, maybe a minute of music before the vocals kicked in. Somewhere along the way I had the idea for just the bass and vocal to open it, and after that everything else fell into place.

I say fell into place, but really I was stuck. I needed a female vocal, and not just any female vocal, but a voice that could grab attention. After chasing down dead end after dead end, your friend and mine Johny James repeated for what I’m sure was the hundredth time “What about Vanessa?”. What about Vanessa? Well, Vanessa is a phenomenal vocalist, that’s what. How lucky would I be to have Vanessa come sing on the track? Apparently about as lucky as I needed to be, because she did it and she killed it.

I also had help from Andrew O’Halloran, who took my initial sketches of the song back when there weren’t proper verses and I was singing gibberish just to get the cadence down, and he came back with synth parts that slotted into the song perfectly. There was no sense of what Shirky was supposed to sound like before this song, but it wouldn’t sound right if Andrew wasn’t a magician. The irony: Johny James had said, once upon a time, “What about my friend Andrew?”.

So maybe after all of this, given getting Shirky is about shaking off the things you’ve convinced yourself you’re supposed to do and just doing the thing that feels good. Following your instinct regardless of where it leads.

The lesson of course is that when you’re not sure what the next move is, ask yourself what would Johny do?

I can tell you: Get Shirky.