Oh God, this track was a hoot, from beginning to end.

Once we started thinking about GO WEST as a double, all these "let's do this!" ideas came to the fore. One of them was to have Evie sing a song, and another was to try a clavinet funk thing a la Stevie Wonder (which is such a cool sound I am shocked people don't reach back for it more often...it may be just the sheer difficulty of pulling off a decent clavinet track). GO WEST was a great opportunity to use good ideas that had never found a home, and this song was built on the oldest idea of all: the clavinet riff the song is based around popped into my head when I was 15, inspired by a Rolling Stones album track, and I'd never been able to fit it into a completed song until now.

The track started as an experiment; basically a drum pattern over which I laid three separate clavinet patches (the same way Stevie Wonder got his multilayered sound) that interlocked. I didn't think it was going to sound like anything, but it did, so then I overlaid the bass line, and then the guitar line (the last thing tracked before the Telecaster got stolen, and the only thing recorded through my little Fender Supro amp which, unlike the Tele, was never recovered).

I was thrilled -- this was sounding pretty authentically funky to me -- and so the next challenge was the lyrics. I had my own personal reasons for writing them, but in the GO WEST song sequence it also segued into the getting married to the wrong person for the wrong reasons part of the album, carried through on the next two songs (it's also the last song on the album that's probably from a female point of view, though the disgusted observer singing the song could be anybody).

I was totally stuck how to approach the idea until I broke two rules I almost always followed with lyrics -- avoid double entendres and no misogyny. As soon as I decided to make the woman in the song the villain (originally is was more directed at the guy), and let no innuendo go unsung, the lyrics came together in no time flat, and were pretty funny to boot. I was so excited when I finished the lyrics that I took the track over to Teresa's house and sang the vocal live in falsetto, writhing and thrusting my hips a la Prince.

The next task was convincing Evie to sing it, which she didn't commit to do at first (though she was excited about overlaying her guitar bits), and it took her awhile to really come to grips with the song, since it wasn't a lyric she really related to. But once she did...oh man. It was just what you'd expect, which is to say awesome, punching up the melody and taking the whole thing to a new level. I had a few lines left over from the scratch vocal I really liked, and I wound up cutting some extra vocals (some at the last minute right before the mixdown) to make the track flow better, so it wound up being more of a duet, but Evie still owns the song.

The best part of all, though, was cutting the background vocals. It was done at about 1 a.m. in my room, after Evie had cut her leads. Literally Evie, Teresa and I were sitting in front of the microphone with the laptop in my lap, making the whole thing up as we went along. One of us would come up with an idea, we'd rehearse it quickly, sing it, double it, and move on, getting more and more outrageous and campy as the song spun to its chaotic conclusion. The fact that it came out so perfectly female session singer-like is stunning because we came up with the entire arrangement, rehearsed and recorded it around one mic, from start to finish, in about 40 minutes.

The piece de resistance, of course, was the horn track, performed by Probyn Gregory and Ken Pace. Probyn came up with the cool figure in the choruses and the ending parts were done exactly like the background vocals -- in a frantic on-the-spot arrangement with Probyn and I tossing ideas at each other, getting as much down as possible by the end of the session. Again, once the horns were on the track, I was beside myself with excitement at how cool the whole thing sounded.

In an album full of random ideas that worked out miraculously, "Two Children In A Bed" is almost in a league of its own...there's not a single part of the record that isn't cool in its own right (and I forgot to mention Kurt's sly, puckish drumming).