This song is a bit unsuspecting, hidden at the end of the album.  It isn’t complicated or flashy and it was basically two song ideas that were put together to make one.  But somehow it is one of my favourites.  Here are some facts about Won’t Be Missing You:

• At Byron’s suggestion, the lyrics of the finale changed from “I’ll be missing you again” to “I won’t be missing you again.”
• There is an amazing cello line in the verses that we didn’t include on the album because it made it a little too pretty.
• Hugh plays his bass through three (count ‘em) three distortion pedals for the outro which is why there is that crazy distorted squeeling going into it.
• The beat in the final verse is made by a 70′s drum simulation pedal that we found randomly in Byron’s place and just had to use it somewhere (I think it’s used in the background of Baby Steps as well).
• This is the first song that Hugh started playing keys on.
• The “ahs” at the end actually started as an arrangement idea we recorded so that we would remember it.  We ended up just using those vocals.  Once we doubled and repeated it at the end of the song we knew it would be the album ender.

[Listen to Won't Be Missing You]

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Since the four of us have known each other for so long we have become good at a few things. One of these things is being diplomatic but brutally honest with each other; another is realizing when this is happening and understanding what the person is actually saying. So when I played Kent this song idea and he said he really liked the verses I knew he did like the verses but was also saying that the chorus sucked, which, (looking back) it did. The challenge, then, became to write a new one.

I wouldn’t say that writing a chorus is harder than writing a verse. I would say that writing a chorus to a verse is harder than writing a verse to a chorus (follow me?). I think this is because choruses (at least in commercial music) have got to be at least 50% more important than verses. Unfortunately, about nine times out of ten we seem to do it the hard way. Baby Steps was not the exception.*

Two heads are better than one. Four heads are better then two… most of the time. But during Baby Steps’ chorus writing session it was beginning to look more like a Mexican standoff. To avoid this, Kent and Hugh went to develop some ideas on their own, leaving Prevost and me staring at each other from behind our respective instruments. I should look at Steve more often when writing because I immediately got a vision of him thrashing away… complete with audio. I attempted to break the singer/drummer language barrier using the appropriate “bah-bah, kah-kah’s” and he did an unbelievable job of make sense of the jibberish. After some fine tuning, Steve came up with the rhythm that is in the final version of the song. If I remember correctly, Hugh and Kent were sold as soon as they heard it.

[Listen to Baby Steps]

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(* Footnote: This is indicated by the fact that the words “baby steps” don’t appear one single time in the entire song. Those lyrics, from the original scrapped chorus idea, just sort of stuck.)