Behind The Song ‘Raining’

I wrote the music and melodies for ‘Raining‘ at my day job in Vancouver. It was a job selling futons and it was a pretty slow time of year, so long periods would go by without customers coming in. I kept my guitar stashed in the back room and would set up under the door bell, so I would hear people enter through the front door. Picture this: Me and my acoustic guitar, hair tied back wearing “semi-acceptable clothes” for a retail job balancing on a stack of disassembled shelving units writing for hours… Ha! Not exactly where I though I’d be writing these songs, but you gotta do what you gotta do!

I took those melodies to my favorite beach in Vancouver the next day (a nude beach) where the strangest character sat down between me and the shoreline. This guy in his 30s was either high as a kite or had some mental issues, or maybe a bit of both. He had a beach towel with the ‘Snakes and Ladders’ game on it and he sat there smoking extra long cigarettes and playing this children’s game by himself – rolling dice, smoking and moving characters around the board. He was smoking like it was his first time, like he was mimicking someone he saw in a movie. To say the least he and his world were quite peculiar. The strangest thing was, that he was oblivious to his surroundings and I’m guessing society in general – he couldn’t have been happier.

This got me thinking about us as people and the strange things we carry inside. Our subliminal voices, our degrees of sanity and insanity that live inside and come out in different amounts on different days. We are all crazy – that’s what it boils down to. I’m glad that ‘Raining’ has united all of us “crazy people”. The more we band together the less crazy it all seems.

Check out this video of us performing ‘Raining’ live in Little Rock, AK at Edgefest. Adam Gontier joined us on stage and we sang our hearts out to the 15 or 20,000 people that were there!