The One & Only Bill Davis

The official home of music and projects by The One & Only Bill Davis

Filtering by Category: songwriting

Song History: Motivation

I started writing Motivation immediately upon falling in love with Melanie. I was basically just trying to get my feelings across. They say that when you fall in love you know it, and it's true. The trick, I think is making that clear to the one you love and saying "I love you" just doesn't cut the mustard.

I wanted Melanie to know, not just what I would do for her, but what her love had already done for me. Pretty mushy stuff! I felt it was too personal to share with the world, but as I've found, the closer something is to your heart and more personal it is, the more it resonates with others and proves how similar each of our unique life experiences are.

Song History: Act

Sometimes a melody comes and goes. Act was written in parts and basically backwards over a period of roughly 5 years.

It first crossed my radar while I was still living in Edwards, CO. It was just a partial melody (the chord progression after "anguish") back then; a loop that I would whistle or hum while I was in transit or at work.

A few years later I decided to try my hand at jingles. I attempted to write a 30 second song about pizza. The opening melody of the song was originally worded "Pizza's really good and that is understood by everyone". This was obviously terrible (unlike pizza!) and, as a result, it was shelved. I laughed it off, but never forgot the melody. 

A year or so later when I was unemployed and feeling particularly down on myself, I gave myself the pep talk that I could have used from just about anyone else. But like they say, "If you want something done right do it yourself". The second (pizza) melody rolled right into a new third melody and that fed into the first. It came together rather quickly, in the way that Thanksgiving dinner takes hours and hours to prepare but travels from the kitchen to the table in minutes.

Song History: Davenport

I was visiting my brother and his wife in Cumberland Gap for the weekend when I ended the trip on a bad note. We were working on something that required a computer. Their office doubled as a scrap-booking and craft area. While it occurred to me to keep liquids away from the computer, it did not occur to me to treat the craft table in a like manner.

Just before I left, I knocked my nearly empty coffee cup over. Though a small amount, the coffee traveled everywhere fast. Needless to say, I messed up some of his wife's scrap-booking materials. We did our best cleanup/salvage job, but the damage was done. She was busy at work and I wasn't able to apologize to her before leaving.

As I made the 3 hour drive back to Nashville I contemplated my clumsiness and lamented my mistake. The phrases "we can't take you anywhere" and "this is why we can't have nice things" came to mind. I started thinking about how maybe everyone I come into contact with should have plastic covers on their furniture. I also thought about how covering your furniture in plastic was a grandmotherly thing to do. My Grandma did not do that (because she was super classy and totally awesome), but she did call her couch a davenport. Davenport rolls off the tongue much better than scrap-booking table, (or any other word with a P next to a B) and so the substitution was made. Suddenly, just before Knoxville, the song came out as a stream of consciousness. Oddly enough, I was able to repeat it. I sang it over and over until I made it to Nashville, where I anxiously put pen to paper upon my arrival.

To this day, Davenport is the only song I've ever written that takes as long to play as it did to write.

Bill Davis