Some songs refuse to stay dead and buried. Mercy Please is a reincarnation specialist. Or it is a cat and it has used up six of its nine lives, which are as follows:

Life #1: It started out as a song with what I thought was a clever title – Amee. I thought this title was clever because it was the name of a girl and also the chord names, Am, E, E. There were two problems that we chose to completely ignore. 1) Most girls with this name spell it Aimee, or if you’re conventional, Amey or Amy. 2) The chords in the song are Am, Em, F. Oh well.

Life #2: For some reason we thought that we could get away with putting a punk chorus in the middle of a set of ballads and nobody would notice. When we realized this might not work we slowed it down and turned it into a long (emphasized long) jam song. I can’t really remember it but I’m quite sure it sucked so we stopped playing it.

Life #3: We went back to it for some unknown reason and wrote a new chorus and lyrics about the tortures of dating (gasp!). Renamed ‘Helicopters’ (thank God) this was a staple in our set for a while. People actually liked it!

Life #4: During the writing sessions we did with Byron in preparation for this album, it got a new chorus. It was recorded in that state.

Life #5: Listening to this song we realized that the new choruses were about a hundred times better than the verses. Byron and I jammed out some chord and melody ideas for the verses and all of a sudden it was a completely different song.

Life #6: It was okay but something was off and it almost got the axe again. Because it was put together in such a bizarre way it didn’t have the live energy that the other songs did. We decided it would only have a chance if we re-recorded it and (partly because we were running out of time) went with the simplest way possible. I went into Canterbury Studios on May 16, sat in front of a Baldwin Grand and a vocal mic, click in my ear, and played three takes. I think the one on the album is the middle of the three.

[Listen to Mercy Please]

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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.)